Inner Speech and Cognitive Self-Regulation

“A unique feature of human intelligence is the ability to seamlessly combine task-oriented actions with verbal reasoning (or inner speech), which has been theorized to play an important role in human cognition for enabling self-regulation or strategization and maintaining a working memory.”

• Yao et al. (2023), citing Vygotsky (1987), Luria (1965), Fernyhough (2010), Baddeley (1992)

The authors use this theoretical frame to motivate why LLMs should interleave reasoning and acting. The cooking analogy: between actions (opening fridge, cutting vegetables), humans reason to track progress, handle exceptions (“I don’t have salt, let me use soy sauce”), and realize when external information is needed (“How do I prepare dough? Let me search”).

This positions explicit reasoning traces as analogous to Vygotskian “inner speech” (not just a prompting technique, but a simulation of a fundamental cognitive mechanism.

Related: 05-molecule—thought-action-observation-pattern, 07-molecule—act-to-reason-reason-to-act