Explaining Social Behaviors Via Cognitive Map

Human thinking and behaviors vary under many circumstances such as social interactions and stress. A major psychological view that forms the foundation of this phenomenon was schema, which refers to a hierarchical representation of explicit knowledge and suggests that this allows us to reason and make inferences to a novel situation. In addition, script, which is involved in explaining multiple procedural behaviors, may play an important role in determining how we behave given by the prior knowledge. Recent studies in neuroscience may explain these proposed psychological theories. Especially cognitive map, an idea proposed by Tolman, which was initially used to explain spatial cognition but later found to be explained the encoding of more abstract variables, may explain human thinking and behaviors. Moreover, the geometric properties of the activity of the neuronal population, via neural manifold modeling, provides more insights to the mapping of cognitive variables.