arXiv AI

Large Language Models Align with the Human Brain during Creative Thinking

arXiv:2604. 03480v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Creative thinking is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, and divergent thinking-the capacity to generate novel and varied ideas-is widely regarded as its core generative engine.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Cognitive Expert Language Models Better Align with the Corresponding Brain Systems

The study investigates whether language models tailored to specific cognitive domains better align with corresponding brain systems. By prompting and fine‑tuning large language models into six domain experts—sensory, spatial, numerical, reasoning, social, and abstract—the authors find that each expert’s representations more closely match the brain region associated with its domain than other experts. This domain‑specific alignment holds across multiple base models and fMRI datasets, while overall prediction accuracy remains largely unchanged, indicating that regional alignment can be obscured when summarizing across the brain.

By Zhivar Sourati, Mengxuan Helen Wu, Nona Ghazizadeh, Jonas Kaplan, Morteza Dehghani, Samuel A. Nastase
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Cross-lingual brain-language model alignment is robust but challenges hierarchical and computational accounts

The study examined whether brain-language model alignment reflects shared computational mechanisms or merely stable lexical‑semantic correspondences. Using whole‑brain encoding across Mandarin, English, and French, transformer representations predicted activity in a distributed network that overlapped across languages and remained stable across layers. Contextual embeddings and measures of prediction or compression did not outperform static lexical embeddings, suggesting that alignment is robust but not informative about shared computational processes.

By Ni Yang, Rui He, Philipp Homan, Iris Sommer, Davide Staub, Wolfram Hinzen
arXiv AI
4d ago

Which Attention Heads are like the Human Head? Not the Ones that Compute

The study investigates whether attention heads in large language models that align with human EEG signals are causally involved in model computation. By ablating these brain‑aligned heads during a pattern‑completion task, the authors find that while such heads contribute to performance, their removal is less disruptive than removing heads selected by attribution patching. The research also distinguishes two families of brain‑aligned heads—novelty and repetition heads—highlighting that novelty heads track human attention but are less critical than random ablation, whereas repetition heads modestly aid performance and align with abstract‑pattern representations.

By Christopher Pinier, Gustaw Opie{\l}ka, Hannes Rosenbusch, Taylor Webb, Michael D. Nunez, Claire E. Stevenson