Taxi in London
I study London taxi drivers. It is the first to examine human mental planning in a realistic environment on the scale of a city.
Like the taxi drivers experienced from London plan in advance its routes?
An international team of scientists, including researchers from the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, analyzed this issue.
O is the first to examine human mental planning in a realistic environment on the scale of a city.
London taxi drivers have been known to science since, 25 years ago, their hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with memory and navigation, presents different characteristics due to the intense learning of the city streets.
Now researchers have focused on how these professionals mentally organize their driving strategy.
Strategic planning in the middle of chaos
The study involved 43 licensed taxi drivers, who received starting points and destinations in London.
The task consisted of verbalize, without the help of maps, the sequence of streets and intersections necessary to complete the route.
During the experience, scientists measured Two types of response time: The “Offline Reflection Time” (before the first appointment of a street) and “online time” (between each streets or turns).
The results showed that the taxi drivers do not think linearly, naming streets in the order in which they would cross them.
Instead, first mentally identify the most critical junctions of the route Before they fill the details.
This process, called “Non-Local cache pre-rheary of critical junctions”highlights the way they prioritize key elements of the city before starting to name the streets.
Brain vs. Ia
Researchers also compared the way taxi drivers plan the routes with the methods used by Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms.
“Os AI algorithms cannot explain the behavior of humans Experienced in this situation, ”explained Daniel McNamee, researcher at the Champalimaud Foundation, quoted in.
The study suggests that human approach is more flexible and efficientconsidering variables such as traffic and accessibility of the streets.
Another curious fact was that the taxi drivers took more time to mentally process longer streetsindicating that they perceive the city realistically and not just abstractly.
“We expected that taxi drivers had a less concrete view of the city, but the real length of the streets affects your planning”Commented McNamee.
Researchers believe these findings can help improve AI, allowing navigation algorithms to learn from human intuition. In addition, collaborative AI systems can benefit from understanding how humans organize and process complex spatial information.
