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"Act Like a 5th Grader" is Not Enough: Bounding Knowledge in LLM-Based User Simulators

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 30, 2026 · UTC

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate human behavior but frequently fail to exhibit realistic cognitive constraints, suffering from a "superhuman bias." Using a dataset of over 71,000 reading comprehension responses from 2,359 primary-school students (grades 4--6), we demonstrate that standard persona prompting yields near-perfect, deterministic performance, failing to capture the natural variance of developing readers. To address this, we introduce the Cognitively Bounded User Simulator (CBUS), an architectural framework that explicitly models the restricted working m

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