Executive functions

Faculty 08/10 · building blockHuman 92.0 · AI 74.5Humans lead +17.53 benchmarks →10 items

At a glance

Planning, switching strategy when rules change, inhibiting old habits.

Executive functions steer thinking: planning, switching strategy when the rules change, and holding back habits that no longer fit.

The classic probe is card sorting: a hidden rule changes without warning, and the question is how fast you abandon what used to work.

Human ref.: 92.0
Best AI: 74.5
Gap: +17.5
Our items: 10

Sub-faculties

The parts of this faculty, what our items cover today, and what is still to come

Sub-faculty	Mirrors	Items	Status
Rule switching Dropping a rule that stopped working and finding the new one. Mirrors Turn Bench	Turn Bench	4	Covered
Inhibition Stopping an automatic response, like reading a word instead of naming its ink colour. Mirrors Luo et al. (2025)	Luo et al. (2025)	3	Covered
Planning Ordering steps so they reach a goal without dead ends. Mirrors PlanBench	PlanBench	3	Covered

Human vs AI

Best published result on each side, 0–100

Human ref.

92.0

Best AI

74.5

Humans. University-educated testers complete most of GAIA's multi-step assistant tasks.

AI. The best agents complete fewer of GAIA's tasks than people do. When a game's rules flip in secret, some models notice but keep reconciling the change with their old picture of the game.

Human ref. 92.0: Share of GAIA's multi-step assistant questions answered correctly by university-educated testers, in the GAIA paper (2023). About the test →
Best AI 74.5: Share answered correctly by the best agent on Princeton's HAL leaderboard, Claude Sonnet 4.5, where every agent runs under the same harness (May 2026). About the test →

Human referenceOur estimateBest published AILabel = human − AI, points

Example items

Specimens written for this page. Live items are similar but never published.

Catch the rule changespecimen · not scored

Sort each card onto a pile. Only “right” or “wrong” is shown; the hidden rule changes without warning.

(a) Piles

(b) Card to sort

Feedback: “right” / “wrong” only

Figure 1. A rule-switching item. The sorting rule (colour, shape, number) switches after four correct sorts. Benchmark: Turn Bench. Answer: Two red squares: pile 1 under the colour rule, pile 3 after the switch to shape, pile 2 once number rules.

Turn Bench benchmark page →

Restack the blocksspecimen · not scored

Move one top block at a time until the towers match the goal.

(a) Start

(b) Goal (3 moves at least)

BAC

Figure 2. A block-stacking plan. C has to end on top, so it has to move last. Benchmark: PlanBench. Answer: 3 moves: B onto the empty tower, then A on top of it, then C.

PlanBench benchmark page →

Name the inkspecimen · not scored

Name the colour of the ink, not the word.

(a) One word at a time: name the ink

redgreenyellowblue

Figure 3. Stroop colour words. Reading is automatic, so a word that names a different colour slows people down and draws errors. Benchmark: Luo et al. (2025). Answer: Blue, green, red, yellow: the inks, from left to right.

Luo et al. (2025) benchmark page →

Benchmarks

3 rows

Benchmark	Origin	Items	Best AI	Humans
Turn Bench	Kaggle × Google DeepMind hackathon, Executive Functions track winner, 2026	4	80%	—
PlanBench	PlanBench (Valmeekam et al.), 2023	3	97.8%	—
Luo et al. (2025)	Luo et al. (2025); Stroop (1935), 2025	3	93.1%	—

In everyday life

Adapting a plan when the train is cancelled
Stopping a habit that no longer helps
Juggling several deadlines