[2605.16514] No Plan, Yet Human: A Reactive Robotics Model Predicts Human Planning Failures on a Clinical Task
[Submitted on 15 May 2026]
Title:No Plan, Yet Human: A Reactive Robotics Model Predicts Human Planning Failures on a Clinical Task
View a PDF of the paper titled No Plan, Yet Human: A Reactive Robotics Model Predicts Human Planning Failures on a Clinical Task, by Michael Migacev and 3 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Understanding why some sequential planning problems are harder than others requires models that go beyond average performance. They should capture the specific pattern of which problems are hard, and ideally fail in the same way people do when planning capacity is reduced. We apply AICON, a reactive gradient-descent framework developed for robotic manipulation, to the Tower of London test, a cognitive test used to assess planning in Parkinson's disease, mild cognitive impairment, and stroke. Without any lookahead planning or knowledge of human cognition, AICON reproduces the fine-grained human difficulty ordering across 24 problems better than structural task parameters and generalizes to held-out problems in a leave-two-out evaluation. Crucially, AICON outperforms a planning baseline for groups with reduced planning capacity while the planning baseline better captures healthy controls. This dissociation was predicted by the original AICON paper, which noted that the model's failure modes resemble those of Parkinson's patients who struggle with goal hierarchies but not move counts. This suggests that as planning capacity is reduced, human behavior shifts toward the reactive mode AICON models. The finding extends a broader pattern: AICON, originally built for robotics, now captures aspects of biological behavior across perception, eye movements, and sequential planning, suggesting its core abstraction reflects something real about how biological systems are organized.
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.16514 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2605.16514v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.16514
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Vito Mengers [view email] [v1] Fri, 15 May 2026 18:07:34 UTC (77 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled No Plan, Yet Human: A Reactive Robotics Model Predicts Human Planning Failures on a Clinical Task, by Michael Migacev and 3 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.RO
new | recent | 2026-05
Change to browse by:
cs cs.AI
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)