What is a cognitive map, how was it investigated, how is it characterized, and what role does it play in a person’s mental life? About this in the article.
What are cognitive maps?
A person, adapting to the world, actively transforms it and develops in himself those necessary qualities and models of behavior that will help him to successfully exist. Everything that happens, with which the subject interacts and what he transforms, becomes the basis for the appearance of images of his spatial environment. This image is a cognitive map. Like the person himself, the map is subjective and displays the coordinates specific to it and the relative position of objects in one picture.
The cognitive map (or cognitive scheme) has its spatial coordinates (top, bottom, etc.) in which objects are located. The map is of great importance for a person, allowing him to navigate in space, set a goal and achieve it. The practical activity of a person would be very difficult or even impossible without presenting the environment in which he operates.
The cognitive map is formed not only in adults with developed speech and the ability to self-observation. Young children, as they examine their place of residence, can navigate it without outside help. Moreover, such a quality is inherent in animals that was discovered in the process of experimental work with psychologists.
History of the origin of the concept
The concept of "cognitive map" was proposed by the American psychologist E. Tolman. This happened in the late 40s of the twentieth century. In his work “The cognitive map in rats and humans,” he presented the results of studies on this phenomenon. So, the psychologist noticed that rats, placed in a labyrinth and finding a way out of it to the feeding trough, can repeat the same way by swimming. Thus, they act according to the internal map, the movement pattern.
Such a scheme develops in beings endowed with the psyche, based on previous experience. It consists of routes, interconnections of environmental elements, which subsequently affect the behavior of a person or an animal. The researcher believed that experimental rats formed precisely the picture, a system of related elements, and not just remembering the chain of necessary actions. To create a mental analogue of a physical map, Tolman suggested closing his eyes and imagining how many windows are in a famous room.
The maps of Tolman's theory should be understood as direct, metaphorical and distinguish them from sign systems created by the person that he uses.
Some study details
Studies have shown several characteristic trends in the formation of cognitive maps:
- the tendency to overestimate familiar distances and underestimate poorly known;
- tendency to straighten slightly curved paths;
- the tendency to bring crossed paths to perpendicular.
Such distortions, for example, lead to the fact that the distance between settlements within the same country seems to be smaller than between points located in different countries. Even if the distance between them is the same.
Cognitive theory
The theory and practice of cognitive psychology, which includes Tolman’s theory of cognitive maps, as an independent direction in psychology arose in the 60s of the last century. Thanks to this teaching, the world of psychology was supplemented by knowledge that the psyche is a combination of cognitive (cognitive) operations. Cognitive psychologists are now working on the study of mental cognitive processes (thinking, perception, attention, etc.)
Cognitive theory has its own research approach and practice of therapy. So, cognitive psychotherapists believe that all destructive processes of a psychological nature in a person arise due to a violation of the processes of cognition and self-knowledge. For example, a person suffering from depression, answering the questions: “Who am I?”, “What is my future?”, Will give exclusively pessimistic, self-derogatory answers. Therefore, the cognitive work with him will be aimed at correcting such mental models that affect the patient’s emotional state.
Cognitive Map Examples
The theory of cognitive maps distinguishes two of their types:
- a path map as a specific route, consisting of successive points and related elements;
- Survey map as a simultaneous representation of existing objects in space.
As a person develops, he improves his cognitive maps, which helps him to collect, store and reproduce information about the spatial arrangement of things. Such processes are of interest to scientists of many sciences, since cognitive maps in a certain sense control the human imagination and, in fact, they are.
The most striking example of the “work” of cognitive maps is the traveler’s road, which does not follow the route of a geographical map, but rather an internal reference point. At the same time, the wanderer adds his own route scheme in his imagination, relying on some memorable details of the outside world (trees, signs, signs, etc.). Thanks to this process, even after the passage of time, a person can "see" the path traveled and its features.