In this paper we summarize five experiments that were designed to investigate how tactile maps contribute to the cognitive maps of people with visual impairments. In two experiments we demonstrated that tactile maps can contribute to peoples' ability to learn a route through an unfamiliar area. From the results of two further studies, we argue that compared to people with sight, people with visual impairments have greater difficulty encoding information from a map. We considered this directly in a fifth experiment by investigating how people with visual impairments search and learn a map. We found that they used less efficient strategies than people with sight. We conclude that tactile maps are an important source of geographical information when people need to learn about new environments, but we also point out that to benefit most from tactile maps people need to encode the map information as effectively as possible. As people with visual impairments do not always use the most appropriate encoding strategies we suggest that tactile map users might benefit from greater experience and training in map encoding strategies.