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This paper proposes using large language models as prediction-only controls to clarify the boundaries of cognitive phenomena and their biological underpinnings.

June 19, 2026Open Access

The Delta: Large Language Models as a Prediction-Only Control that De-confounds the Mind Sciences

Key Points

This paper proposes using large language models as prediction-only controls to clarify the boundaries of cognitive phenomena and their biological underpinnings.
Argues for language models to act as prediction controls in cognitive science
Analyzes cognitive phenomena that language models reproduce without a biological basis
Explores the implications for understanding the narrative and minimal self
Identifies that reconstructing the narrative self from a non-biological substrate is possible while the minimal self cannot be captured similarly
Demonstrates that phenomena absent in language models indicate specific biological substrates are necessary
Operationalizes the reverse-inference critique to address over-attribution of cognitive phenomena to biological frameworks

Abstract

Large language models are usually studied as models of cognition, probed with the tasks of cognitive and developmental psychology. This paper argues for the opposite use: a language model as a prediction-only control. Because such a model reproduces many cognitive phenomena — competing-route conflict, surprise-weighted encoding, encoding hysteresis, reactance, a Dunning–Kruger confidence curve — while lacking a body, homeostasis, dopaminergic value, a salience network, and between-session consolidation, and runs on a non-constitutive substrate (weights unchanged by their own operating history), a phenomenon it reproduces cannot require the missing biological machinery. Such a control de-confounds the mind sciences in a way no human or animal preparation can, and it cuts both ways: where a phenomenon is absent it localises a candidate substrate (Polarity A); where its operational signature is reproduced on a non-constitutive substrate it exposes an over-attribution (Polarity B), operationalising Poldrack’s reverse-inference critique with a working system. The sharpest case is the self: the narrative self can be reconstructed from an external store on a generic substrate, whereas the minimal/bodily self cannot — a dissociation long theorised but never empirically separable in people. The argument is bounded by an explicit inheritance control (the signature survives stripping the human content it could have inherited) and by the distinction between functional similarity and mechanistic identity; necessity is addressed through a proposed systems-ladder. Companion papers in the series develop the cognitive and perceptual faces of the biases-as-architecture claim, the competing-routes measurement-model programme, and the social-friction worked cases. Prepared for submission to Trends in Cognitive Sciences (Opinion).

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