Animal navigation without mental representation

Abstract Do animals require rich internal representations, such as cognitive maps, to navigate complex environments? Some researchers believe so, as they argue that sensory information is “too poor” to account for animals’ wayfinding abilities. However, this assumption is debatable, as James J. Gibson showed. Gibson proposed that wayfinding involves detecting information about environmental structure over time and used the concepts of “vistas” and “transitions” to explain terrestrial navigation. While these concepts may not apply universally to animal navigation, they highlight the importance of exploiting stable environmental structures for wayfinding. By searching for species-relative environmental structures, we may gain insight into the navigational abilities of different nonhuman animals, while recognizing the unique evolutionary histories and ecological contexts that have shaped these abilities.