Cognitive Maps
Edward Tolman introduced the term “cognitive map” in 1948 to explain something behaviorism couldn’t: rats learning mazes seemed to build internal representations of the space, not just stimulus-response chains.
His key experiment: rats explored a maze without reward, then were placed at the start with food at the end. They solved it nearly as fast as rats trained with food throughout. They had learned the spatial layout during exploration, without reinforcement. Something more than reflexes was operating.
The neural substrate emerged decades later. In 1971, John O’Keefe discovered place cells in the rat hippocampus — neurons that fire specifically when the animal occupies a particular location. Cell A fires in the northwest corner. Cell B fires near the water bottle. The firing is allocentric (relative to the environment, not the body) and remarkably stable. Return to a familiar environment after weeks, and the same cells fire in the same places.
May-Britt and Edvard Moser found complementary grid cells in the entorhinal cortex in 2005. These fire in hexagonal patterns across space — a coordinate system underlying the specific place code. Together with head-direction cells and border cells, the brain constructs something like a GPS system from first principles.
Human cognitive maps distort reality in predictable ways. We straighten curved routes, regularize angles toward 90 degrees, and cluster landmarks. Ask people to draw their city and the map will show systematic biases: downtown exaggerated, familiar neighborhoods detailed, distant areas compressed.
Barbara Tversky’s research showed that cognitive maps are hierarchical. We remember that Berkeley is in California before we remember its relationship to Oakland. Errors propagate: if the hierarchy is wrong, detailed spatial knowledge within it becomes useless. Knowing the streets of a neighborhood doesn’t help if you misplace the entire neighborhood.
The cognitive map metaphor has expanded beyond spatial navigation. Tolman himself suggested that mental representations extend to goal structures, social relationships, decision spaces. We map not just where things are but how things relate.
The phrase “navigating a new job” isn’t just metaphor. Some researchers argue spatial cognition is the evolutionary foundation for abstract reasoning — that we think about relationships, arguments, and plans using mental machinery originally evolved for finding our way home.
Go Deeper
Books
- The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch — Urban planning classic on how people mentally map cities. Five elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks.
- Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky — Cognitive scientist on spatial thinking and its extension to abstract thought.
Essays
- “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men” by Edward Tolman (1948) — The foundational paper. Still readable and provocative.
- O’Keefe & Moser’s Nobel Prize lectures — On the discovery of place cells and grid cells.
Related: [[navigation]], [[dead-reckoning]], [[chunking]], [[tacit-knowledge]]