The idea that we remember past experiences in order to predict future ones can be traced back as least as far as Tolman (1948). His research, with various other scholars, conducted at a time when behaviourism was the dominant theory in psychology, led him to propose that learning by association did not result in conditioned stimulus-response, but rather that animals (including humans) developed expectancies based on prior experience. He coined the term “cognitive map” to describe the higher-order representations that were formed during learning. For example, in one experiment, summarised in Tolman (1948), rats trained to run down one arm of a maze for food, were more likely to run down an arm in a similar direction when the original arm was blocked, showing that they had not only learned to associate the arm with the food reward, but had formed a cognitive map of the orientation of the maze. This cognitive map represented the task at a level of abstraction, allowing the rats to generalise from prior learning and transfer that knowledge to new stimuli. More recent research suggests that animals and humans form cognitive maps of a variety of tasks and events, not just spatial maps, enabling them to make predictions that optimise reward in new situations (Behrens et al., 2018).