Edward C. Tolman, an American psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, developed the concept of the cognitive map. He introduced the idea formally in his 1948 paper “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” published in Psychological Review. The concept was radical for its time: Tolman argued that animals (and humans) build internal mental representations of their environment rather than simply reacting to stimuli.
Tolman’s Rat Maze Experiments
Tolman’s most striking evidence came from a series of maze experiments with rats conducted in the 1940s. In the key experiment, 56 female rats were trained to follow an indirect, winding route through an elevated runway with right-angled turns forming an S-bend to reach a food reward. Once the rats had learned this path, the researchers blocked it and offered 18 new paths fanning out from a central platform in a “sunburst” arrangement. One of these paths, Path #6, pointed directly toward where the food had been.
The results were striking: 36% of the rats chose Path #6, the shortcut they had never traveled before. Tolman concluded that these rats hadn’t just memorized a sequence of left and right turns. They had built a spatial representation of the environment, understood where the food was located relative to their starting point, and figured out that an unfamiliar path could get them there faster.
Why This Was So Controversial
In the 1930s and 1940s, psychology was dominated by behaviorism, the idea that all learning boils down to associations between stimuli and responses. Leading figures like Clark Hull and Edwin Guthrie, building on Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning work, argued that animals learn by linking environmental cues directly to specific behaviors. Reinforcement (a reward or punishment) was considered essential for any learning to take place.
Tolman’s cognitive map theory directly challenged this framework. His earlier latent learning experiments, conducted with Honzik in 1930, had already shown that rats could learn the layout of a maze without any food reward at all. Rats that explored an unrewarded maze for 10 days and then received food on Day 11 immediately performed as well as rats that had been rewarded from the start. They had been learning all along, just without any visible reason to show it.
Behaviorists scrambled to explain these results within their own framework. Hull proposed that subtle motivational variables and something he called the “fractional antedating goal reaction” could account for the sudden performance jump on Day 11. Other reinforcement theorists expanded the concept of drives to try to accommodate the findings. But Tolman’s interpretation was simpler: the rats had quietly built an internal map of the maze during those unrewarded days and used it the moment a reward made it worth their while. This emphasis on internal mental representations helped lay the groundwork for the cognitive revolution in psychology that would follow in the 1950s and 1960s.
From Theory to Brain Cells
Tolman’s cognitive map remained a theoretical concept for over two decades. Then, in 1971, neuroscientist John O’Keefe discovered something remarkable in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped brain structure deep in the temporal lobe. He found individual nerve cells that fired only when a rat was in a specific location in its environment. These “place cells” acted like pins on an internal map, each one representing a particular spot in physical space.
Decades later, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser discovered a complementary system in a neighboring brain region. These “grid cells” fire in precise geometric patterns as an animal moves through space, creating something like an internal coordinate system. Together, place cells and grid cells form the neural network that actually computes the spatial maps Tolman had proposed on purely behavioral grounds. All three researchers shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for these discoveries.
Cognitive Maps in the Human Brain
Brain imaging studies have confirmed that humans use the same core regions for navigation. The hippocampus and surrounding cortex support map-like spatial codes, while nearby structures help anchor those maps to landmarks in the environment. When people actively navigate, whether in the real world or a virtual environment, frontal lobe regions also become active, consistent with their role in planning routes rather than simply recognizing locations. Intracranial recordings from patients undergoing brain surgery have shown that individual cells in the human hippocampus encode specific views and navigation goals, much as O’Keefe’s place cells do in rats.
Researchers have also found that the brain’s “cognitive mapping” ability extends beyond physical space. The hippocampus appears to organize abstract information, like social hierarchies or conceptual relationships, in map-like structures. This suggests that the spatial navigation system Tolman first glimpsed in his maze-running rats may be a general-purpose tool the brain uses to organize many kinds of knowledge.
Beyond Psychology: Cognitive Maps in Urban Design
Tolman’s concept also migrated into urban planning. In 1960, architect Kevin Lynch published The Image of the City, exploring how people form mental maps of their surroundings. Lynch identified five elements that shape a person’s cognitive map of a city: paths (streets and walkways), nodes (intersections and gathering points), edges (boundaries like rivers or highways), districts (neighborhoods with a distinct character), and landmarks (distinctive visual reference points). His framework has influenced decades of research in spatial cognition, urban design, and more recently artificial intelligence, and remains a foundational tool for understanding how people perceive and navigate built environments.