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In the article, Hutchinson asks the question, “is gps making us dumb?” People model their spatial surroundings with varying skills and capacities. Crucially, contra traditionalists who will argue that there is a racial or gender component to these skills, it looks like these mental mapping skills are trainable. So if you exercise your brain, it gets stronger. And if you rely on your gps a lot, well, you might just get dumb. Okay, it’s nowhere near that clear. But read the article anyway! It gets me excited to think about the way we think. Metacognition! Yeah.
On one critical note, I think Hutchinson is wrong to say that Edward C. Tolman was the first academic to argue that we carry maps around in our head. Kenneth Craik published The Nature of Explanation in 1943 and while he might not have actually used the word “map” (although that’s worth checking) I do know that he posited an array of mental structures to make sense of the way that “thought models, or parrallels, reality.”1 Sounds like the spirit of cognitive maps to me – especially given that he was writing in an era marked dramatically by behaviourism. That said, I failed to include Tolman’s 1948 paper in my citations. Even though it’s about experimenting with rats, I should have cited it and it would have made for another fun way to show how people that are less obsessed with language actually find super-productive ways to further our understanding of the human mind.