is more in line with a very different navigation strategy, stimulus response, which treats navigation as a series of motor responses: turn left, go five hundred feet, then turn right. But it’s clear that turn-by-turn directions prioritize stimulus response over cognitive mapping. In 2020, researchers at McGill University asked subjects to navigate two virtual mazes—one that was easily traversed with cognitive-mapping strategies and one that could be better navigated using stimulus response. The more that people used G.P.S., the worse their spatial memory seemed to be, and the worse they did on the cognitive-mapping maze. “Beyond that, I had no idea what was going on, and I needed a different map, or couldn’t get there at all,” he said.