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Later Clarification Could Not Undo the First Guess

Equivalent dialogue content produced different results when its order changed.

Published Updated Story ID: mp-2026-09-23-019
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Summary

Equivalent dialogue content produced different results when its order changed.

Controlled writing, planning and coding dialogues produced different outcomes when equivalent information arrived in a different order. The authors call the effect early posterior collapse and found that summaries and chain-of-thought prompting did not reliably restore the corrected task state.

Why it matters

Equivalent dialogue content produced different results when its order changed.

Limits and context

  • The authors call the effect early posterior collapse and found that summaries and chain-of-thought prompting did not reliably restore the corrected task state.

Key claims

  1. Equivalent dialogue content produced different results when its order changed.

    Qualification: The authors call the effect early posterior collapse and found that summaries and chain-of-thought prompting did not reliably restore the corrected task state.

    Evidence: source-2026-09-23-021

Sources

  1. arXiv preprint 2609.25337arXiv · primary research

Corrections

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