Huttenlocher and colleagues (1991) famously distinguished between systems of spatial representation responsible for coarse spatial representation and those responsible for fine-grained spatial representation. Most work in spatial cognition focuses exclusively on the latter, however. In our lab, we’ve been interested in topology as a way of understanding primitive spatial representations as they exist before metric detail is added to them. It turns out that removing detail from a map can actually be cognitively beneficial; this is why popular topological subway maps — common to most metro systems around the world — are particularly effective. They remove extraneous spatial detail to emphasize topological structure.