human-alignment-neural-behavioral--40703af2·1 events·first seen Aliases: human alignment (neural/behavioral)
This paper compares matched LLM and VLM pairs in a text-only setting to isolate the effect of multimodal training history on human-like language processing. Using whole-cortex fMRI and eye-tracking data from natural reading, the authors find that multimodal pretraining does not confer a uniform global advantage in human alignment. However, VLMs show selective advantages when sentences contain stronger visual semantic content, with converging evidence from both neural and behavioral measures. The findings suggest language-internal representations remain the primary driver of human text processing alignment.