spatial cognitive maps used for navigation are extendable to arbitrarily high dimensional spaces for abstract concept representation, using pretty much the same machinery.
There is a ton of work on this, both theory and empirical evidence, here are just a few:
There is a ton of work on this, both theory and empirical evidence, here are just a few:
"Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6415/eaat6766.abs...
"Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code" https://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6292/1464
"The Hippocampus Encodes Distances in Multidimensional Feature Space" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221...
"A non-spatial account of place and grid cells based on clustering models of concept learning" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13760-8
"A learned map for places and concepts in the human MTL" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.15.152504v1....
"What Is a Cognitive Map? Organizing Knowledge for Flexible Behavior" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...
"A map of abstract relational knowledge in the human hippocampal–entorhinal cortex" https://elifesciences.org/articles/17086
"Map-Like Representations of an Abstract Conceptual Space in the Human Brain" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7884611/
"Knowledge Across Reference Frames: Cognitive Maps and Image Spaces" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136466132...
"Concept formation as a computational cognitive process" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215462...
"Efficient and flexible representation of higher-dimensional cognitive variables with grid cells" https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...
"The cognitive map in humans: spatial navigation and beyond" https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4656
"A general model of hippocampal and dorsal striatal learning and decision making" https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/31427.short
"On the Integration of Space, Time, and Memory" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...