COGNITIVE MAP

Cognitive map

Cognitive map

Introduction

Cognitive mapping may be defined as a process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, codes, stores, recalls, and decodes information about the relative locations and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment.( Downs RM, 1973)

In more general terms, a cognitive map may be defined as "an overall mental image or representation of the space and layout of a setting", which means that the act of cognitive mapping is "the mental structuring process leading to the creation of a cognitive map".( Arthur, 1992)

Discussion

In navigating to a goal, animals have several mechanisms at their disposal. Some of these are now well understood. For example, sun compasses have been precisely elucidated, particularly in the case of honeybees and desert ants. Animals can also navigate using path integration; however, devoid of input from the position of remembered landmarks, this mechanism accumulates errors.

Similarly, compasses are limited in only providing directional information to animals. Invariably then, for successful navigation to occur in real-world environments, some memory of the position of landmarks is also required. How is this spatial information stored and integrated in memory? In the case of desert ants, and honeybees in simplified spatial environments, experiments involving manipulation of landmark features have revealed some of the crucial features.

However, for animals navigating in more complex spatial environments, much less is known. To make rapid progress in this area, it is essential to have hypotheses with clear behaviorally testable predictions. Over the last half century, a dominant focus of research has been determining whether animals have 'cognitive maps'. As there remains widespread confusion over what actually constitutes a cognitive map and which animals have cognitive maps, this paper focuses particularly on these issues. (Tolman, 1998)

Any point in space can be specified by its location from an

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