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The Tower of London (TOL) is an executive function task utilized primarily to assess planning capacity, although it can also be used to evaluate working memory, rule learning, the ability to inhibit responding, self-monitoring and regulation, problem solving, and establishing and maintaining set. There are a multitude of TOL tasks in existence, but the initial TOL was devised by Tim Shallice (1982) as an improvement upon the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) task (see Historical Background). Shallice employed his TOL to assess planning in patients with frontal lobe lesions.
Shallice’s TOL task consists of two boards, each of which contains three vertical pegs of increasing length and three different colored (red, blue, and green) beads or balls that are placed onto the pegs. The shortest peg only accommodates one bead; the second, two; and the third, three. On the examiner’s board, the beads are arranged on the pegs in a goal position, and on...
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References and Reading
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Krch, D. (2018). Tower of London. In: Kreutzer, J., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_1912-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56782-2_1912-2
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