Is There an Alternative Hypothesis to the Old View of Spatial Knowledge?

The original thinking about how knowledge is formed was what's called an associative one. It assumed that sensory information comes in and actions get generated by the associations. So for example, I know that if I come out of my door and turn right, I will eventually come to the letter box where I can post my letter or something like that. To be spatial, there needs to be something about the relationship of things to each other. And it's from studies of the neural activity in the hippocampus that we now know that there really is this metric information.