Abstract The mammalian brain organises knowledge about entities in the world and relationships between them using cognitive maps. When forming a cognitive map, there is a necessary trade-off between extending the map to make novel inferences, and storing a veridical copy of past experience. However, the neural mechanisms that control this trade-off remain unknown. Using a cross-scale approach that combines a pharmacological intervention in humans with neural network modelling, we show that the neuromodulator noradrenaline elicits a significant ‘spread of association’ across hippocampal cognitive maps. This neural spread of association can be explained by changes in synaptic plasticity that predict overgeneralisation in behaviour. Thus, elevated noradrenaline during learning increases the ‘smoothing kernel’ for plasticity across the cognitive map, allowing disparate memories to become linked and distorted.