How disorganization affects learning hidden structure

In everyday life, we constantly build mental maps that help us understand how things are related, even when those relationships are not directly visible. These mental maps allow us to generalize, make predictions, and learn from experience.

In this study, we show that people who tend to think in a more disorganized way (with very mild psychosis traits) have particular difficulty building such mental maps when information is presented visually. When the same underlying structure is explained using language, their performance improves markedly. This suggests that the problem is not a general inability to learn, but a specific difficulty in turning visual input into an internal structure.

We believe that our findings help explain why some individuals struggle more with visually grounded reasoning and abstraction, while still performing well when information is verbally structured. More broadly, the results point to language as a potential scaffold that can support learning and reasoning when perceptual organization is challenging.

This preprint has been led by Xiaoyan is work from the ERC Synergy Project DELTA-LANG. You can read the full paper here.