Humans and many non-human animals need to accurately and efficiently navigate from one place to the next in their environment. Over 3,000 years ago the volcanic islands of the Pacific were settled by the people of Polynesia (Gibbons, 2001). These navigators sailed in craft from Samoa to Hawaii covering an area extending some 4,500 km without the benefits of modern navigational equipment. Errors in the es timation of direction or position during trips to and from the islands in this region could have dire consequences. Some 2,400 years later, European sailors had started mastering oceanic navigation and were probably surprised to discover that people had already traveled to, and were living on, these remote Pacific islands. Today, few humans make such long trips without the benefits of modern navigational tools. Traditionally investigations of human and nonhuman place learning have used very different approaches to understand the underlying mechanisms involved in spatial learning. Although these approaches and associated techniques have provided each respective research area with valuable information about spatial processing, one important problem has been the minimal communication between the two disciplines which share such a common interest. Our review examines the two main theories of place learning—the associative approach and the cognitive mapping theory—through the examination of current research using three main behavioral techniques that were developed for the study of spatial navigation in animals but modified for the study of human spatial navigation. Although the focus of our review is at a behavioral level, we consider how these approaches have strengthened our understanding of the neurological mechanisms of place learning in animals and discuss how future research, comparative in nature, will allow for an excellent opportunity for future comparative studies of spatial place learning. Many non-human animals were engaging in impressive feats of navigation long before people were navigating across oceans. Desert ants (Cataglyphis fortis) live in subterranean nests that insulate them from arid conditions above ground. During the course of the day foraging ants depart their nest in search of food, in this case other insects that have succumbed to the desert heat. The foraging desert ant may be required to take a rather long (several hundred meters) and circuitous route before it finds a food item, since the loca tion of food items vary dramatically from day to day. Once the foraging ant has found food, it takes a direct route back to the entrance of the subterranean nest (Wehner, 2003). Errors in the estimation of the nest location could easily prove fatal. Notably, like an early human navigator on the ocean, the ant’s impressive feat of navigation is accomplished in a relatively homogeneous environment lacking surfaces that could be used as landmarks to help indicate the position of the nest.