Do Machines Fail Like Humans? A Human-Centred Out-of-Distribution Spectrum for Mapping Error Alignment

Determining whether AI systems process information similarly to humans is central to cognitive science and trustworthy AI. While modern AI models can match human accuracy on standard tasks, such parity does not guarantee that their underlying decision-making strategies resemble those of humans. Assessing performance using error alignment metrics to compare how humans and models fail, and how this changes for distorted, or otherwise more challenging, stimuli, provides a viable pathway toward a finer characterization of model-human alignment. However, existing out-of-distribution (OOD) analyses for challenging stimuli are limited due to methodological choices: they define OOD shift relative to model training data or use arbitrary distortion-specific parameters with little correspondence to human perception, hindering principled comparisons. We propose a human-centred framework that redefines the degree of OOD as a spectrum of human perceptual difficulty. By quantifying how much a collection of stimuli deviates from an undistorted reference set based on human accuracy, we construct an OOD spectrum and identify four distinct regimes of perceptual challenge. This approach enables principled model-human comparisons at calibrated difficulty levels. We apply this framework to object recognition and reveal unique, regime-dependent model-human alignment rankings and profiles across deep learning architectures. Vision-language models are most consistently human aligned across near- and far-OOD conditions, but convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are more aligned than vision transformers (ViTs) for near-OOD and ViTs are more aligned than CNNs for far-OOD. Our work demonstrates the critical importance of accounting for cross-condition differences, such as perceptual difficulty, for a principled assessment of model-human alignment.