  Learning and interpreting the structure of the environment is an innate
feature of biological systems, and is integral to guiding flexible behaviours
for evolutionary viability. The concept of a cognitive map has emerged as one
of the leading metaphors for these capacities, and unravelling the learning and
neural representation of such a map has become a central focus of neuroscience.
While experimentalists are providing a detailed picture of the neural substrate
of cognitive maps in hippocampus and beyond, theorists have been busy building
models to bridge the divide between neurons, computation, and behaviour. These
models can account for a variety of known representations and neural phenomena,
but often provide a differing understanding of not only the underlying
principles of cognitive maps, but also the respective roles of hippocampus and
cortex. In this Perspective, we bring many of these models into a common
language, distil their underlying principles of constructing cognitive maps,
provide novel (re)interpretations for neural phenomena, suggest how the
principles can be extended to account for prefrontal cortex representations
and, finally, speculate on the role of cognitive maps in higher cognitive
capacities.
