ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Not all cognitive offloading is equal: distinguishing dependent and autonomous offloading to generative AI.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Telling Students to Evaluate Does Not Make It Happen: Task Stage, Offloading Tendency, and Error Detection in AI-Assisted Student Writing.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Cognitive Performance Under AI Advice: Development and Initial Validation of a CHC-Informed Assessment for Organizational Decision-Making.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Family-school autonomy support for children's responsible use of generative artificial intelligence: a self-determination theory synthesis and developmental research agenda.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- Borrowed or kept? How self-generation-first and direct-adoption AI workflows shape immediate unaided reasoning.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- AI-driven adaptive training for utility employees: a three-wave cluster-randomized field experiment on cognitive-load and personalization-fit pathways.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT now perform core cognitive operations-reasoning, synthesis, evaluation, and creative generation-on users' behalf, raising urgent questions for educational psychology about how AI use relates to cognitive development. Yet research on cognitive offloading has largely treated AI use as a unidimensional phenomenon, obscuring a theoretically consequential distinction: whether AI substitutes for the user's own thinking or scaffolds it. Drawing on the autonomous-dependent help typology and self-determination theory, the present study introduces and examines a distinction between
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Registered trials
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