Abstract
Planning ability is fundamental for goal-directed spatial navigation. Preliminary findings from patients and healthy individuals suggest that travel planning (TP)—namely, navigational planning—can be considered a distinct process from visuospatial planning (VP) ability. To shed light on this distinction, two right brain-damaged patients without hemineglect were compared with a control group on two tasks aimed at testing VP (i.e., Tower of London-16, ToL-16) and TP (i.e., Minefield Task, MFT). The former requires planning the moves to reach the right configuration of three colored beads on three pegs, whereas the latter was opportunely developed to assess TP in the navigational environment when obstacles are present. Specifically, the MFT requires participants to plan a route on a large carpet avoiding some hidden obstacles previously observed. Patient 1 showed lesions encompassing the temporoparietal region and the insula; she performed poorer than the control group on the ToL-16 but showed no deficit on the MFT. Conversely, Patient 2 showed lesions mainly located in the occipitoparietal network of spatial navigation; she performed worse than the control group on the MFT but not on the ToL-16. In both cases performances satisfied the criteria for a classical dissociation, meeting criteria for a double dissociation. These results support the idea that TP is a distinct ability and that it is dissociated from VP skills.
Highlights
Planning ability is fundamental for ensuring efficient spatial navigation and it can explain the wide individual differences frequently reported in spatial navigation, both in healthy (Wolbers and Hegarty, 2010; Sharma et al, 2016; Bocchi et al, 2017, 2019) and in clinical populations (Passini et al, 1995; Ciaramelli, 2008)
This ability has been called in several ways: visuospatial planning (VP; Basso et al, 2006; Cazzato et al, 2010), spatial navigational planning (Martinet et al, 2011; Schacter et al, 2017; Carrieri et al, 2018: Bocchi et al, 2017) or, even, travel planning (TP; Bocchi et al, 2019) that is the term we will adopt thereafter
We expected that the difference between the cases’ standardized scores on the two tests was greater than the difference between the same two tests obtained from a control group
Summary
Planning ability is fundamental for ensuring efficient spatial navigation and it can explain the wide individual differences frequently reported in spatial navigation, both in healthy (Wolbers and Hegarty, 2010; Sharma et al, 2016; Bocchi et al, 2017, 2019) and in clinical populations (Passini et al, 1995; Ciaramelli, 2008). Passini et al (1995) reported that patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s Disease failed in reaching a destination in the hospital and this was mainly due to their impaired planning ability. Despite studies directly testing these differences, especially in brain-damaged patients, are still lacking, it is important to approach such an investigation for both theoretical and clinical implications It can disclose if these processes are dissociated, and it can be useful for disentangling subtle deficits in travel planning in brain-damaged patients who usually show motor impairments (Mohr and Binder, 2011), and may need to set out alternatives ways to blocked-routes. To allow testing patients with motor disorders, to the WalCT adopted with patients (De Nigris et al, 2013), participants performed the route from the green circle to the red circle by using a pointer, being careful to avoid the positions in which they had seen the mines in the observation phase.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
