Humans Disengage, Reasoning Models Persist: An Item-Controlled Dissociation in Deliberation Allocation
This paper reveals a critical dissociation between humans and large reasoning models (LRMs) in deliberation allocation: while both spend more time on harder problems overall, humans invest less time on items they ultimately get wrong (abandoning difficult tasks), whereas LRMs paradoxically generate longer reasoning traces on problems they fail (persisting in uncertainty), highlighting a fundamental difference in stopping and control policies despite surface-level similarities.