Wayfinding Behavior

The metaphor of a "cognitive map" has attracted wide interest since it was first proposed in the late 1940s. Researchers from fields as diverse as psychology, geography, and urban planning have explored how humans process and use spatial information, often with a view to explaining why people make way-finding errors or what makes one person a better navigator than another. But there has also been an intense debate among biologists over whether animals have cognitive maps or have other forms of internal spatial representations that allow them to behave as if they did. Yet until now, little has…