Small Foundation Models of Human Cognition and Behaviour

arXiv cs.AIAugust 7, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

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. We train fourteen models from 135M to 14B parameters across four architecture families on Psych-101, a dataset of 10.7 million trial-level choices from 160 experiments. In-distribution, scale barely matters. The models fall within a narrow band, as though against a ceiling, and 0.6B to 1B parameters suffice to match a 70B baseline on held-out participants. Out-of-distribution, that band opens into a marke

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