Working memory, or the ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind, is a critical component of human intelligence and executive functioning. It is correlated with performance on various cognitive tasks, including measures of fluid intelligence, which encompasses reasoning and problem solving. We use a comprehensive set of classic working memory tasks to estimate the working memory capacity of large language models (LLMs). We find that in most cases, LLMs exceed normative human scores. However, we do not find that the increased capacity of working memory is associated with higher performance on other executive functioning tasks or problem solving benchmarks. These results suggest that LLMs may have deficits in attentional control and cognitive flexibility, which result in difficulties with inhibiting automatic responses and adapting to shifting information. Our findings suggest that reasoning models, although they often do not currently fully compensate for these deficits, may have the potential to do so in the future.

Writing is a cognitively demanding activity that requires constant decision-making, heavy reliance on working memory, and frequent shifts between tasks of different goals. To build writing assistants that truly align with writers’ cognition, it is necessary to capture and analyze the complete thought process behind how writers transform ideas into final texts. We present SCHOLAWRITE, the first dataset of end-to-end scholarly writing, tracing the multi-month journey from initial drafts to final manuscripts. The dataset traces nearly 62K LaTeX-based edits from five computer science preprints over four months and is enriched with fine-grained annotations of cognitive writing intentions. We demonstrate the value of ScholaWrite through three complementary contributions: (1) analysis of real-world writing behavior reveals that scholarly writing is highly non-linear and multi-intentional, blending rapid drafting bursts with cognitively sustained writing sessions; (2) evaluations of current large language models show that they struggle to provide meaningful support throughout the human writing process; and (3) models finetuned on SCHOLAWRITE demonstrate improved alignment with human writing workflows. SCHOLAWRITE underscores the value of capturing scientists’ cognitive writing process and provides actionable insights and resources for the development of future writing assistants.

Large language models (LLMs) exihibit increasingly sophisticated linguistic capabilities, yet the extent to which these behaviors reflect human-like cognition versus advanced pattern recognition remains an open question.In this study, we investigate how LLMs process the temporal meaning of linguistic aspect in narratives that were previously used in human studies. Using an Expert-in-the-Loop probing pipeline, we conduct a series of targeted experiments to assess whether LLMs construct semantic representations and pragmatic inferences in a human-like manner.Our findings show that LLMs over-rely on prototypicality, produce inconsistent aspectual judgments, and struggle with causal reasoning derived from aspect, raising concerns about their ability to fully comprehend narratives.These results suggest that LLMs process aspect fundamentally differently from humans and lack robust narrative understanding.Beyond these empirical findings, we develop a standardized experimental framework for the reliable assessment of LLMs’ cognitive and linguistic capabilities.