Disorganization impairs cognitive maps built from visual inputs

The human brain organizes fragmented information into internal maps that support inference of latent relational structure. Vulnerabilities in this mapping process have been hypothesized to contribute to psychosis-spectrum disorders. Whether internal maps arise as readily from visual input as from linguistic description remains unknown. Here, participants learned food items associated with two abstract attributes, presented as images or language, organized along two abstract dimensions within a two-dimensional conceptual space. Participants then completed similarity judgments and reward-learning tasks that required inference of the underlying relational structure. We show that cognitive disorganization, a hallmark of psychosis-spectrum traits, selectively impairs spatial sensitivity and reward generalization when relational structure must be inferred from visual input, but not when matched structure is provided by linguistic descriptions. These findings support the shallow cognitive map hypothesis and suggest that cognitive disorganization selectively disrupts the transformation of perceptual input into stable relational representations.