Cognitive map: concept, research, features

What is a cognitive map, how it was researched, what it is characterized and what role it plays in a person's mental life - about this in the article.

What are cognitive maps?

Man, adapting in the world, actively transforms it and develops in himself those necessary qualities and behaviors 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 his images of his spatial environment. This image is a cognitive map. Like the person himself, the map is subjective and displays the inherent coordinates only and the relative position of objects in one picture.

The cognitive map (or cognitive schema) has its spatial coordinates (top, bottom, etc.) in which the 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 the presentation of the environment in which he acts.

The cognitive map is formed not only in adults with developed speech and the ability to self-observation. Small children as they study the place of residence can be guided in it without outside help. Moreover, this quality is inherent in animals, which was discovered in the process of experimental work with psychologists.

The origin of the concept

The concept of "cognitive map" was suggested by the American psychologist E. Tolman. This happened in the late 40-ies of the twentieth century. In his work "The Cognitive Map in Rats and Man," he presented the results of research on this phenomenon. So, the psychologist noticed that rats, placed in a labyrinth and finding a way out to the feeding trough, can repeat the same way by swimming. Thus, they act according to the internal map, the traffic pattern.

Such a scheme develops in beings endowed with the psyche, on the basis of previous experience. It consists of routes, interconnections of elements of the environment, which subsequently influence the behavior of a person or an animal. The researcher believed that in the experimental rats the picture was formed, the system of related elements, and not merely memorizing the chain of necessary actions. To create a mental analogue of the physical map, Tolman suggested closing his eyes and imagine how many windows are in a well-known room.

The maps of Tolman's theory should be understood as direct, metaphorical and distinguish them from the symbolic systems created by the person that he uses.

Some details of the study

Studies have shown several characteristic trends in the formation of cognitive maps:

• The tendency to overestimate the familiar distances and underestimate the poorly known;
• Tendency to straighten slightly curved paths;
• Tendency to approach the crossed paths to perpendicular.

Such distortions, for example, lead to the fact that the distance between settlements within one country seems to be smaller than between the points that are 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, emerged as an independent trend in psychology in the 1960s. Thanks to this doctrine, the world of psychology was supplemented by the knowledge that the psyche is a set of cognitive (cognitive) operations. Psychologists-cognitivists are also 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 because of the violation of the processes of cognition and self-knowledge. For example, a depressed person, answering the questions: "Who am I?", "What is my future?", Will give only pessimistic, self-deprecating answers. Therefore, the work of the cognitivist with him will be aimed at correcting such mental models that affect the emotional state of the patient.

Examples of cognitive maps

The theory of cognitive maps distinguishes two of them:

• Map-path as a specific route, consisting of consecutive items and related elements;
• Map-view as a simultaneous representation of existing objects in space.

As people develop, they improve their cognitive maps, which helps them 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 imagination of a person and, in fact, they are the same.

The most striking example of the "work" of cognitive maps is the traveler's journey, which follows not the route of the geographical map, but the inner landmark. In this case, the wanderer puts his own route scheme in his imagination, relying on some memorable details of the outside world (trees, signboards, signs, etc.). Thanks to this process, even after time passes, a person can "see" the path traveled and its features.