It may be that the notion of "image schemas" is useful here. Image schemas are the basic elements structuring of the world - the basic way in which we carve the world up. For example, force-dynamic schemas structure our experience of the relationship between events. The explanatory advantage of a image schemas is that they are taken to be universal and pre-linguistic and, as such, there is no reason why non-linguistic animals such as macaques might not deploy them, and thus might well be able to represent some kind of declarative knowledge, (without of course being able to declare it).
It's quite a difficult idea to get hold of (for me at least), but there's a reasonably accessible summary
here