A dynamic route finder for the cognitive map.

Cognitive behaviorist E. C. Tolman (1932) proposed many years ago that rats and men navigate with the aid of cognitive maps, but his theory was incomplete. Critic E. R. Guthrie (1935) pointed out that Tolman's maps lack a rule for action, a route nnder. We show that a dynamic model for stimulus generalization based on an elementary diffusion process can reproduce the qualitative properties of spatial orientation in animals: area-restricted search in the open field, rinding shortcuts, barrier learning (the Umweg problem), spatial "insight " in mazes, and radial maze behavior. The model provides a behavioristic reader for Tolman's cognitive map. The cognitive behaviorist Edward Tblman spent much of his career devising clever experiments to show that stimulus-re-sponse accounts of rat behavior cannot be correct. Some of his most striking demonstrations involve spatial learning. One such example is shown in Figure 1, which depicts a maze apparatus used in a famous experiment by Tolman and Honzik (1930). The maze has three paths from the Start box to the Goal box. The paths differ in length: Path 1 (heavy vertical line) shorter