McKinlay A, Kaller C P, Grace R C, Dalrymple-Alford J C, Anderson T J, Fink J, Roger D
Department of Psychology, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Neuropsychologia. 2008 Jan 15;46(1):384-9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.08.018. Epub 2007 Aug 31.
Although the Tower of London (TOL) has been extensively used to assess planning ability in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), the reported presence or extent of any planning deficits has been inconsistent. This may partly be due to the heterogeneity of the TOL tasks used and a failure to consider how structural problem parameters may affect task complexity. In the present study, planning in PD patients was assessed by systematically manipulating TOL problem structure. Results clearly disprove the identity assumption of problems with an equal number of minimum moves. Instead, substantial parts of planning performance were related to more subtle aspects of problem structure, such as subgoaling patterns and goal hierarchy. Planning in PD patients was not impaired in general but was affected when the information provided by the problem states was ambiguous in terms of the sequential order of subgoals, but not by increases in search depth.
尽管伦敦塔任务（TOL）已被广泛用于评估帕金森病（PD）患者的计划能力，但关于所报告的计划缺陷的存在或程度一直不一致。这可能部分归因于所使用的TOL任务的异质性，以及未能考虑结构问题参数如何影响任务复杂性。在本研究中，通过系统地操纵TOL问题结构来评估PD患者的计划能力。结果清楚地反驳了具有相同最小移动步数的问题的同一性假设。相反，计划表现的很大一部分与问题结构的更细微方面有关，例如子目标模式和目标层次结构。PD患者的计划能力总体上没有受损，但当问题状态提供的信息在子目标的顺序方面不明确时会受到影响，而不是受搜索深度增加的影响。
