they receive a preexposure to this shortcut route. In that case, rats use that route significantly faster and more often than those who were not preexposed. Moreover, they have difficulties making a spatial inference such as taking a novel shortcut route. In 1987, Chapuis and Varlet led an experiment on dogs to determine if they were able to infer shortcuts. The conclusion confirmed their hypothesis. Indeed, the results demonstrated that the dogs were able to go from starting point to point A with food and then go directly to point B without returning to the starting point. But for Andrew T.D. Bennett (1996) it can simply mean that the dogs have seen some landmarks near point B such as trees or buildings and headed towards them because they associated them with the food. Later, in 1998, Cheng and Spetch did an experiment on gerbils. When looking for the hidden food (goal), gerbils were using the relationship between the goal and one landmark at a time. Instead of deducing that the food was equidistant from two landmarks, gerbils were searching it by its position from two independent landmarks. This means that even though animals use landmarks to locate positions, they do it in a certain way. Another experiment, including pigeons this time, showed that they also use landmarks to locate positions. The task was for the pigeons to find hidden food in an arena. A part of the testing was to make sure that they were not using their smell to locate food. These results show and confirm other evidence of links present in those animals between one or multiple landmark(s) and hidden food (Cheng and Spetch, 1998, 2001 ; Spetch and Mondloch, 1993 ; Spetch et al., 1996, 1997). Criticism In a review, Andrew T.D. Bennett noted two principal definitions for the “cognitive map” term. The first one, according to Tolman, O’Keefe, and Nadel, implies the capacity to create novel short-cutting thanks to vigorous memorization of the landmarks. The second one, according to Gallistel, considers a cognitive map as “any representation of space held by an animal”. This lack of a proper definition is also shared by Thinus-Blanc (1996) who stated that the definition is not enough clear. Therefore, this makes further experiments difficult to conclude. However, Bennett argued that there is no clear evidence for cognitive maps in non-human animals (i.e. cognitive map according to Tolman's definition). This argument