Neuropsychology of planning

Abstract

Planning has long been associated with prefrontal cortex, often based on anecdotal data. During the past 40 years a number of experimental studies have begun to clarify the picture. Among the takeaways of this literature are that the planning literature can be divided into well-structured tower tasks and real-world planning tasks. Among the tower tasks there are significant differences between the Tower of Hanoi and the Tower of London, and there are reasons to believe that in the former any planning component is confounded by other factors. The Tower of London is a more straight-forward sequencing task and implicates dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Real-world planning tasks have both ill-structured and well-structured components. Patients with lesions to right BA 10 have difficulty in real-world planning tasks (but not in tower tasks). Interestingly they do not have deficits traceable to planning/sequencing abilities but rather with a failure to engage the problem at the appropriate level of abstraction. These results emphasis the importance of task analysis and caution us about hasty generalization across “planning” tasks.