Abstract

BackgroundThe traveling salesperson problem (TSP) refers to a task in which one finds the shortest path when traveling through multiple spatially distributed points. Little is known about the developmental course of the strategies used to solve TSPs. The present study examined young children's performance and route selection strategies in one-way TSPs using a city-block metric. A touch screen-based navigation task was applied.Methodology/Principal FindingsChildren (39–70 months) and adults (21–35 years) made serial responses on a touch screen to move a picture of a dog (the target) to two or three identical pictures of a bone (the goals). For all the versions of the tasks, significant improvement in measures of performance was observed from younger to older participants. In TSPs in which a specific route selection strategy such as the nearest-neighbor strategy minimized the total traveling distance, older participants used that strategy more frequently than younger ones. By contrast, in TSPs in which multiple strategies equally led to the minimal traveling distance, children tended to use strategies different from those used by adults, such as traveling straight to the farthest goal first.Conclusions/SignificanceThe results primarily suggest development of efficient route selection strategies that can optimize total numbers of movements and/or solution time. Unlike adults, children sometimes prioritized other strategies such as traveling straight ahead until being forced to change directions. This may reflect the fact that children were either less attentive to the task or less efficient at perceiving the overall shape of the problem and/or the relative distance from the starting location to each goal.

Highlights

  • The traveling salesperson problem (TSP) is a problem in which a traveler is required to find the shortest possible path when visiting multiple locations once before returning to a starting point

  • We examined the solutions of young children between 3 and 5 years of age on TSPs presented on a touch screen

  • We examined the developmental course of performance in preschool children and adults when solving touch screen-based multi-goal navigation tasks that represented TSPs

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Summary

Introduction

The traveling salesperson problem (TSP) is a problem in which a traveler is required to find the shortest possible path when visiting multiple locations once before returning to a starting point. Empirical studies on experimental psychology and cognitive science have addressed the mental mechanisms that humans may use when solving TSPs [5,6,7,8,9,10,11] These studies concur in finding that adult humans quickly attain close-to-optimal solutions in TSPs with varying numbers of visiting locations. Children sometimes prioritized other strategies such as traveling straight ahead until being forced to change directions This may reflect the fact that children were either less attentive to the task or less efficient at perceiving the overall shape of the problem and/or the relative distance from the starting location to each goal

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