![]() In both the lab and the field, the animal must be able to recognize a cue at the release site that marks its spatial relation to the goal. In the field, this problem is defined similarly: a displaced animal needs to orient from a novel release point to its experienced home area. ![]() For example, a rat initially trained to reach the goal from a certain start location in a well-learned maze could be tested from a novel start location. The definition of this problem in the laboratory is that an animal needs to orient between its location and its goal using a novel route that has been simulated from its prior knowledge of the space. The cognitive map, in its modern definition, represents the most flexible use of spatial information to solve a simple problem: the animal must devise a novel solution to orient to its goal. The goal of our review is to propose such a synthesis, to increase the power and scope of interdisciplinary communication related to the issue of the cognitive map. The concept of the cognitive map is one common to all, yet we lack a synthesis or agreement as to its precise nature and characteristics. Goal-directed movement across space thus has the potential to integrate these disciplines conceptually. How humans and other animals model their external world for spatial navigation has captured the imagination of scientists from ethology, ecology, cognitive and comparative psychology, neuroscience, robotics and artificial intelligence. By taking concepts from ethology and the parallel map theory, we propose a path to directly integrating the three great experimental paradigms of navigation: the honeybee, the homing pigeon and the laboratory rodent, towards the goal of a robust, unified theory of animal navigation. For example, free-ranging, flying animals must process more extended cues than walking animals and for this reason alone, the integrated map strategy may be found more reliably in some species. This may require a specific ontogeny, in which the navigator’s nervous system is exposed to naturally complex spatial contingencies, a circumstance that occurs rarely, if ever, in the lab. Not only do animals need to map extended cues but they must also have sufficient information processing capacity. ![]() Because of the paucity of extended cues in the lab, the flexible solutions allowed by the integrated map should be rare, despite abundant neurophysiological evidence for the existence of the machinery needed to encode and map extended cues through voluntary movement. Thus a navigator must be able to move freely to map extended cues only then should the weighted hierarchy of available navigation mechanisms shift in favor of the integrated map. To create a bearing map (and hence integrated map) from extended cues requires self-movement over a large enough space to sample and model these cues at a high resolution. Moreover, this has implications for the lab. ![]() We propose that the dual navigational mechanisms of pigeons, the navigational map and the familiar area map, could be homologous to these mammalian parallel maps this has implications for both research paradigms. Here the cognitive map is redefined as the integrated map, which is a construction of dual mechanisms, one based on directional cues (bearing map) and the other on positional cues (sketch map). To reconcile this and other debates within the field of navigation, we return to the concept of the parallel map theory, derived from data on hippocampal function in laboratory rodents. But the communities of researchers that study the cognitive map in non-humans are strangely divided, with debate over its existence found among behaviorists but not neuroscientists.
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