# Response Variability and Stability in Human Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03008 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03008/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 0 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding how humans reason -- and how reasoning responses vary across tasks and individuals -- remains a core challenge for modeling and explanation in cognitive science. We investigate the stability of response patterns within reasoners and whether variation in these patterns can be used to predict learning effects. We introduce a formal, geometry-based method to quantify distances between individual reasoning patterns and their internal variability, grounded in heuristic theories. The proposed framework is tested against experimental data via generalized linear mixed-effects models and clustering, where we find that our proposed variation measure interacts with correctness to predict performance gains. Moreover, we find that reasoning patterns are stable over time within the same reasoner. The method is general enough to be applied to other reasoning domains.