The verbalization of multiple strategies in a variant of the traveling salesperson problem

What kinds of strategies do humans employ when confronted with a complex spatial task, and how do they verbalize these strategies? Previous research concerned with the well-known traveling salesperson problem (TSP) typically aimed at the identification of a generally applicable heuristics that adequately represents human behavior in relation to the abstract task of combining points. This paper adopts a novel perspective in two respects. On the one hand, it addresses the strategies people employ when confronted with a more complex task, involving distractors and feature information rather than identical points. On the other hand, retrospective linguistic representations of the strategies used are analyzed in relation to the behavioral data, using discourse analytic methods. Results show that both the behavioral results and the verbalizations point to a range of strategies related to those proposed for solving abstract TSPs. However, in contrast to earlier accounts in the literature, the participants employ a repertory of multi-faceted strategies and planning processes, simplifying and structuring the problem space across subtasks and processes in flexible ways. These findings provide further insight into the nature of human strategies in spatial problem solving tasks and their retrospective verbalization, highlighting how procedures generally known in the literature may be adapted to more complex tasks, and how they may be verbalized spontaneously.