The study, which was presented at the 2026 Conference on Language Modeling in San Francisco earlier this month, investigated the impacts of shifting mental work onto an AI chatbot across arithmetic and reading comprehension tasks. A growing body of research suggests this process of "cognitive offloading" harms long-term learning and critical thinking abilities.
Liu and her colleagues recruited 1,222 participants for the study, which was released as a preprint earlier this year and has now undergone peer review. The researchers designed three randomized controlled experiments, including two sets of mathematical fraction problems and a series of reading comprehension questions. The participants were split into three groups, so there was no overlap between the experiments. Each experiment took 13 to 15 minutes to complete.
Both groups had the option to skip problems. The researchers explicitly told the participants that there was no penalty for wrong answers, so skipping a problem was a deliberate decision to not engage with it, they wrote in the study. The participants in both groups were also given the correct answer to each problem if they got it wrong, so they could learn from their mistakes.
The second experiment was a copy of the first experiment, but it had 667 participants and small tweaks in the trial design, including the addition of a pretest phase that helped the researchers eliminate participants who were unable to solve the most basic problems. The findings were similar to those of the first experiment, hinting that the use of AI for simple tasks harms perseverance and drive to complete those same tasks without AI, especially when AI is used to get direct solutions.
Calculators allow people to offload math problems, but their effects on reasoning aren't as far-reaching as the effects of AI. (Image credit: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In a third experiment, the team explored the impacts of AI assistance on reading comprehension, which draws on meaning-making skills and mental-model construction — the cognitive process of building internal representations of external reality. The trial included 201 participants, who were divided into a group with access to AI and a control group. The researchers gave both groups five comprehension questions before disabling the AI chatbot and handing each participant another three questions.
"The most significant finding is that people who offload more have higher declines in persistence (increased skip rate), which is an important skill that cuts across domains," Liu said.
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To encourage long-term learning, capability and autonomy in people, AI models and chatbots should be designed to give directions and instructions toward a solution, rather than the solution itself — more like a tutor, the researchers argued.
"We need to work toward a future in which human abilities are, as much as possible, augmented rather than supplanted," study co-author Brian Christian, a computer scientist and researcher in the Center for Human-Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement.
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