Reason to Play: Behavioral and Brain Alignment Between Frontier LRMs and Human Game Learners

ArXi:2605.08019v1 Announce Type: new 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.