Cognitive mapping is the process by which people process their environment, solve problems, and use memory. It was first identified in the late 1940s by Edward Tolman, who observed that rats had internalized the composition of a maze into their brains. Cognitive mapping is now being used in psychotherapy to help patients better navigate their lives.
Cognitive mapping is the means by which people process their environment, solve problems and use memory. It was first identified in the late 1940s by University of California-Berkeley professor Edward Tolman and, as is often the case in the field of psychology, started with laboratory mice. In his experiments, Tolman challenged each mouse with a maze that offered food at the end. He noticed that every time the rats traversed the myriad of little paths and dead ends, they made fewer mistakes. In the end, they were all able to move quickly towards the goal without false starts.
This told Tolman that the rats had internalized the composition of the maze into their brains, which Tolman called “the central office.” Similarly, human infants come to realize through experience that crying will bring food and/or attention. A child learns not to touch a hot stove. A person who has been blinded can still find his way around his house.
So, cognitive mapping is a form of memory, but it’s even more than that. Keeping the sequence of streets in home directions is memory; seeing these streets in your “mind’s eye” as you speak is cognitive mapping. An operational definition of cognitive mapping comes from Downs & Stea in their textbook Cognitive Mapping and Spatial Behavior: “A process composed of a series of psychological transformations by which an individual acquires, encodes, stores, remembers and decodes information about the relative positions and attributes of phenomena in their everyday spatial environment.
This is, however, the most basic interpretation. Indeed, at this level, promising research is being done on how to introduce cognitive mapping into robot programming. But two Russian researchers from George Mason University, building on previous studies, have now postulated that our individual value systems can also be embedded in our cognitive maps.
In other words, if a person believes they have no value as a human being, that could lead them down a path of self-destructive behavior. Every twist and turn in the inner map would logically follow, based on that initial premise. The key phrase in Downs and Stea’s definition may be “a series of psychological transformations”. Cognitive maps are, by necessity, fluid. When Tolman’s mice were faced with a different maze, they followed the same pattern of trial, error, and eventual success.
Therefore, many psychotherapists now use cognitive mapping in their practice. As with Edward Tolman’s tests, the hope is that remapping cognition will help their patients better navigate the maze they’ve entered. Even experience can redraw the map. If, for example, someone grew up in a household that was strongly prejudiced against a particular group of people, that might be the orientation of the cognitive map. But if that person met and became close friends with a person in that despised group, the inner landscape could start to change.
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