Glossary
Cognitive Mapping
What is Cognitive Mapping?
Cognitive mapping concerns how people or other animals represent relationships within an environment or domain. A cognitive map is a mental representation; it need not be a literal picture or an accurate geographic map.
Historical meaning
In Tolman’s 1948 account, maze learning involved representations of routes and environmental relationships rather than only chains of stimulus–response connections. His discussion drew primarily on rat experiments, including latent learning.
Use in user research
The phrase also names a qualitative research exercise. In cognitive-mapping interviews, participants draw or arrange concepts and discuss their relationships. A team might ask a customer to map how they understand a booking process.
The drawing is a description produced during the interview, not the mental representation itself. Interview prompts, drawing confidence, and the situation can affect what appears. Researchers interpret the map together with the conversation and other observations.
Applications in Navigation and Information Architecture
In physical wayfinding, the question may be how someone understands the relationship between places. In an app, it may be how they group services or connect the steps in a task. A map can suggest where a label, route, or category differs from the user’s understanding.
Different people may draw different maps because they have different experience and goals. Use that variation to form design questions rather than treating one drawing as the structure every user needs.
Limits
A clear map can help formulate design questions. It does not establish that a proposed interface is usable, that the representation is complete, or that the same structure applies to every user.