Cognitive Maps — Making Our Way Through this Thing We Call Life
In early cognitive psychology studies (Tolman, 1948), the term cognitive map was originally used to describe the process by which rats learned the sequence of a maze. As such, it represented the process by which they acquired and stored knowledge about the correct route by appearing to develop an internal map-like representation of the environment. Subsequently, this characterization was applied to human thought processes as well.
In current psychological literature, cognitive maps refer to one’s internal mental representations that simulate the physical environment, particularly aspects of relative location and spatial relationships. These representations are based upon three types of orienting information: (1) landmark knowledge — information about particular features at a location which may be based on both imaginal and propositional representations; (2) route-road knowledge — specific pathways for moving from one location to another which may be based on both procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge; and (3) survey knowledge — estimated distances between landmarks which may be represented imaginally or propositionally (Matlin, 2002; Sternberg, 2003). Table 1 provides examples for these aspects of the cognitive maps.
Table 1: Spatial Cognition
