Actionable cognitive maps for spatial and conceptual thinking

Cognitive maps provide a powerful way to compress experience into low-dimensionalstructure that supports flexible learning, inference, and generalization across spatial andconceptual domains. Yet relational structure must ultimately be converted into action anddecision-making. Here we advance a unifying account of how hippocampal–entorhinalcognitive maps become action-relevant, translating core principles from spatial navigation tononspatial declarative knowledge. We first synthesize evidence that conceptual navigationengages complementary allocentric and egocentric reference frames. We then operationalizeegocentric coding in conceptual spaces as an attentional “point of view,” and show how mentalactions can be implemented as shifts of attention over relational structures. Finally, we outlinehow reference-frame transformations and state-updating mechanisms—well characterized inspatial navigation—can generalize to conceptual spaces, yielding representations that supportboth overt behavior and internal mental operations.