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:2607. 26317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Psychometric calibration for educational tests typically requires costly human response data.
By Wenjie Zhou, Yunting Liu, Renjiao Tang, Mark Wilson
arXiv:2608. 05224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models fine-tuned on human behavioural data have emerged as general-purpose cognitive proxies, but the scale this requires, and whether these models process task structure or exploit statistical shortcuts, remain open questions.
By Nick Oh, Fernand Gobet
arXiv:2510.01030v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The human ability to translate diverse perceptual and linguistic inputs into structured behavior has been thought to rest on learning robust repres...
By Zach Studdiford, Timothy T. Rogers, Kushin Mukherjee, Siddharth Suresh
arXiv:2609.38448v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Open-ended LLM homogeneity can create false plurality when several systems appear to offer independent perspectives while returning the same familiar d...
By Ben Wigler, Maria Tsfasman
The paper introduces NeuroCognition, a benchmark based on three neuropsychological tests—Raven's Progressive Matrices, Spatial Working Memory, and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test—to evaluate foundational cognitive abilities in large language models (LLMs). It finds that while LLMs excel on text tasks, their performance drops on image-based and more complex tasks, and they fail different parts of the same tasks compared to humans. NeuroCognition correlates with standard general-capability benchmarks yet measures distinct cognitive skills, highlighting where LLMs align with or diverge from human-like intelligence.
By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Faeyza Rishad Ardi, Alice Oh
arXiv:2603.04419v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Vision-language models produce different object and use descriptions under different persona prompts, but low overlap alone does not identify...
By Murad Farzulla
arXiv:2606. 05497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given the inherently multimodal nature of human experience, vision-language models (VLMs) hold substantial promise for modeling human cognition as it grows and develops with experience.
By Alvin Wei Ming Tan, David Cardinal, Tania Lorido-Botran, Laura Bravo-Sanchez, Sunny Yu, Michael C. Frank
arXiv:2606. 20205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Psychological instruments designed for humans are increasingly used to assign large language models (LLMs) stable psychological profiles that affect their usability, safety assessment, and use as proxies for human participants in research.
By Jelena Meyer, David Garcia, Dirk U. Wulff
arXiv:2607. 07916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models exhibit recurring behavioural patterns -- personas -- that shape generalisation and safety, but we lack reliable tools for decomposing, measuring, and controlling them.
By Luke Baines, Anton Gonzalvez Hawthorne, Mariia Koroliuk, Irakli Shalibashvili, Cl\'ement Dumas, Konstantinos Voudouris, David Demitri Africa
arXiv:2609.09372v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Although MMLU is widely adopted as a benchmark for calibrating general AI capabilities, we psychometrically demonstrate that its aggregate score prim...
By Dana Paquin, Riddhiman Jain
arXiv:2608. 14606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as synthetic survey respondents, but existing evaluations ask whether answers look plausible at the individual level.
By Mantas Lukauskas, Viktorija \v{S}arkauskait\.e