Reasoning Primitives in Hybrid and Non-Hybrid LLMs: Do Architectural Differences Yield Advantages in State-Tracking and Recall?
Reasoning in large language models is often discussed as a single capability, but some of its gains may stem from simpler underlying operations. We examine two such primitives, recall and state-tracking, through five controlled task families centered on state-based recall, and compare matched transformer and hybrid architectures with and without reasoning augmentation. Across the suite, reasoning-augmented variants substantially outperform instruction-only variants, often by large margins. This pattern is consistent with the State over Tokens view: externalized reasoning traces help because they carry the intermediate state forward in token space. By contrast, hybrid inductive bias does not yield a uniform advantage in accuracy once reasoning tokens are available. When architectural differences do appear, they follow task structure: the hybrid Think model is more robust on strictly sequential chained updates, whereas the transformer Think model is more robust on flat multi-hop retrieval. We therefore cast the main contribution of this study as a descriptive account of what drives performance on state-based recall tasks: reasoning-token augmentation appears to be the dominant factor, while hybrid advantages are narrower, task-dependent, and potentially more about inference efficiency than overall capability. We also release the codebase and data required to reproduce these results.