Reason to Play: Behavioral and Brain Alignment Between Frontier LRMs and Human Game Learners
Humans rapidly learn abstract knowledge when encountering novel environments and flexibly deploy this knowledge to guide efficient and intelligent action. Can modern AI systems learn and plan in a similar way? We study this question using a dataset of complex human gameplay with concurrent fMRI recordings, in which participants learn novel video games that require rule discovery, hypothesis revision, and multi-step planning. We jointly evaluate models by their ability to play the games, match human learning behavior, and predict brain activity during the same task, comparing a suite of frontier Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) against model-free and model-based deep reinforcement learning ag...
| Authors | Botos Csaba, Sreejan Kumar, Austin Tudor David Andrews et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 8 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.