Mitch Munns

Presentation Title

Cognitive Maps in Reasoning and Mental Models

Abstract

Recent evidence has shown that the brain’s system for navigating the environment, the cognitive map, is also recruited when spatially representing and reasoning about information that is not inherently spatial. These findings imply that the cognitive map system underlies navigation through abstract, metaphorical space as well as physical space. Despite the neural evidence, there have been few behavioral studies investigating the relationship between abstract spatial representations and individual differences in spatial cognition. Here we present four behavioral studies that support this link. A novel task measured two cognitive processes: the integration of multiple relations into a unified spatial representation and the inferences of novel relations from this representation.  Participants were tasked with representing premises relating objects on two dimensions in space and answered inference problems based on their representation. The structure of the created representations varied widely, with some participants spontaneously creating a uniform grid pattern and others creating less structured representations. The type of information, i.e., concrete spatial information compared to abstract non-spatial information, did not affect task performance. Individual differences in representations and reasoning performance correlated with performance on a measure of spatial scanning (the Hidden Figures Test, previously shown to predict verbal reasoning ability) and with path integration ability, known to rely on grid cells, a key neural component of the cognitive map system. This evidence is consistent with the view that a common cognitive map system underlies the representation of both physical and abstract spaces.