Despite Golledge's definition of cognitive maps at the beginning, definitions of cognitive mapping and wayfinding are not always consistent throughout the book. Taking the presence of places as a part of internal spatial representations for granted is already a strong specialisation. He includes landmarks as fundamental units of cognitive maps. Even the separation of a constellation of objects into single landmarks without differentiation based on their appearance is not necessarily required. Places can also be defined as entities of visual, auditory or other stimuli without direct recourse to object recognition.
Humans certainly make use of landmarks for orientation.
It is emphasised at different sections in the book that cognitive maps should not be viewed as exact topographical replicas of the environment. He also reflects that symmetry and reflexivity axioms of Euclidean metrics need not hold universally in a human cognitive representation. It is commonly agreed that insects do not have true cognitive maps. However, it follows from the multiple landmark theory that insects store snapshots, or at least a preprocessed version of them in memory, in an ordered sequence. Judd et al. present a profound theory, which is based not only on biological observations, but also on computer models.