Cognitive maps reveal people’s underlying decision making rules.
They are a visual representation of how we make sense of a
problem, issue or idea, revealing how we think about the problem
and how we structure our ideas around it. The technique of
cognitive mapping has its origins in George Kelly’s Personal
Construct Theory, which asserts that people are scientists, and
that in an attempt to anticipate (predict) the future we create
subjective classifications of everything in the world (called
personal constructs). This means that by differentiating
concepts, we can create meaning and behave as appropriate to get
what we want from the world.. This is very much a “predict and
control” view of the world, in line with recent discoveries in
brain science and especially our understanding of sensory
perception. Thus, cognitive maps are visual thinking tools
(similar to mind maps), that represent networks of ideas and
associations, and can be used to help organise a complicated
information space so that the relation