Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Large language models(LLMs) exhibit growing potential as autonomous agents, yet their decision-making capabilities in real-world scenarios remain underexplored, particularly in dynamic scenarios where conditions are constantly changing. Most existing benchmarks mainly focus on static environments, which significantly differ from real-world scenarios. Additionally, existing evaluation frameworks lack fine-grained assessments, providing limited insights during evaluation. To address these, we propose FD-Bench a benchmark for evaluating the decision-making in dynamic scenarios. FD-Bench employs a fire evacuation scenario as a representative dynamic setting and decomposes decision-making into perception, prediction, and action stages, enabling granular evaluation of 8 LLMs and different reasoning frameworks. Our results show that LLMs experience a performance drop of over 50% in dynamic versus static scenarios. Inspired by "chunking" principle in Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), our hierarchical prompting strategy demonstrates improved performance in dynamic decision-making tasks. This work provides insights into LLMs' limitations and pathways toward robust real-world deployment.