linguistic:paraphrasing, stylistic:tone, information:highlighting, linguistic:translation
Human and animal performance

The TSP, in particular the Euclidean variant of the problem, has attracted the attention of researchers in cognitive psychology. It has been observed that humans are able to produce near-optimal solutions quickly, in a close-to-linear fashion, with performance that ranges from 1% less efficient, for graphs with 10–20 nodes, to 11% less efficient for graphs with 120 nodes. The apparent ease with which humans accurately generate near-optimal solutions to the problem has led researchers to hypothesize that humans use one or more heuristics, with the two most popular theories arguably being the convex-hull hypothesis and the crossing-avoidance heuristic. However, additional evidence suggests that human performance is quite varied, and individual differences as well as graph geometry appear to affect performance in the task. Nevertheless, results suggest that computer performance on the TSP may be improved by understanding and emulating the methods used by humans for these problems, and have also led to new insights into the mechanisms of human thought. The first issue of the Journal of Problem Solving was devoted to the topic of human performance on TSP, and a 2011 review listed dozens of papers on the subject.

A 2011 study in animal cognition titled "Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus," named after the children's book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, examined spatial cognition in pigeons by studying their flight patterns between multiple feeders in a laboratory in relation to the travelling salesman problem. In the first experiment, pigeons were placed in the corner of a lab room and allowed to fly to nearby feeders containing peas. The researchers found that pigeons largely used proximity to determine which feeder they would select next. In the second experiment, the feeders were arranged in such a way that flying to the nearest feeder at every opportunity would be largely inefficient if the pigeons needed to visit every feeder. The results of the second experiment indicate that pigeons, while still favoring proximity-based solutions, "can plan several steps ahead along the route when the differences in travel costs between efficient and less efficient routes based on proximity become larger." These results are consistent with other experiments done with non-primates, which have proven that some non-primates were able to plan complex travel routes. This suggests non-primates may possess a relatively sophisticated spatial cognitive ability.