This psychological idea was extended broadly to humans for the first time by urban planner Kevin Lynch in his 1960 book The Image of the City. After that, O'Keefe and Nadel composed a 1978 study on these, looking at the hippocampus. The man who coined this term in a 1948 paper likened it to David Krech's idea of "hypotheses" and gave some credit to Kurt Lewin. His experiment involved placing rats in a maze, providing them with a path to reward, and then blocking the path
This psychological idea was extended broadly to humans for the first time by urban planner Kevin Lynch in his 1960 book The Image of the City. After that, O'Keefe and Nadel composed a 1978 study on these, looking at the hippocampus. The man who coined this term in a 1948 paper likened it to David Krech's idea of "hypotheses" and gave some credit to Kurt Lewin. His experiment involved placing rats in a maze, providing them with a path to reward, and then blocking the path or changing the orientation of the rat; the point was that the rats had learned more than basic commands like "turn right." He theorized that these concepts exist ►in "narrow strip" varieities and "broad comprehensive" varieties. FTP, name this idea first coined by Edward Tolman, a spatial series of landmarks learned by the mind to aid recall.   
This psychological idea was extended broadly to humans for the first time by urban planner Kevin Lynch in his 1960 book The Image of the City.
cognitive maps