Spatial and temporal cognitive mapping: a neural network approach

Tolman suggested that cognitive behavior is purposive and can be described in terms of how differant goals are pursued. When pursuing these goals, animals and humans display a remarkable adaptability, which is the result of the combination of a goal-seeking mechanism and a cognitive map. Whereas the goal-seeking mechanism permits the animal to seek different goals, adopting alternative behavioral strategies that are independent of any set of responses, the cognitive map allows the integration of multiple independent pieces of knowledge. Although the concept of cognitive mapping has been mostly applied to spatial mapping, we describe how both spatial and temporal cognitive maps can be mechanistically implemented in terms of recurrent associative networks which store either the adjacency of spatial locations or the contiguity of temporal events. The reinjected predictions of spatial locations or temporal events in the network can be conceptualized as images and their sequences conceptualized as the process of imagining. The combination of goal-seeking systems and cognitive maps permits the description of problem solving tasks in terms of the sequence of subgoals (a plan) to be pursued to reach the goal. Whereas the hippocampus might play a major role in the storage of both spatial and temporal cognitive maps in association cortex, the frontal cortex might participate in goal-seeking tasks, decision making and planing.