Human Brain Function in Path Planning: a Task Study

Abstract

Despite plenty of research being performed in the human movement science, less attention has been paid to the probable method used by the human brain in the higher-level motor planning. The previous studies suggest that the human brain may use a predictive approach to anticipate physical dynamics of the body and the environment to plan a short and collision-free movement trajectory. We propose that the human brain may use a model-based prediction procedure in path planning in which a finite prediction horizon is used to estimate the future state of the body and the environment. A goal-oriented driving task (GDT) in a virtual street was designed to consider the human path planning method in dynamic environments. Two groups of experiments were presented to consider the ability of the human brain in estimation of a dynamic object location and planning a collision-free path. The first group of study includes four GDTs, with different conditions to evaluate how the human planning strategy would change by varying the configuration of the environment. In the second group, the changes of human planning in a visually obscured and blurred situation were considered. The results are in compliance with the theory of using a model-based prediction approach by human brains and indicate that the subjects benefit from a prediction horizon to plan their paths. Our studies provide evidence to introduce possible factors which may be used by the human brain during path planning in dynamic environments.