The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans
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Do neural network models capture the cognitive demands of human reasoning? Across four reasoning domains, we show that the length of the chain-of-thought generated by a large reasoning model predicts human reaction times both within tasks—tracking item-level difficulty—and across tasks—capturing broader differences in cognitive demands. This model-to-human alignment shows that reasoning models mirror core features of problem and task complexity in human cognition.