ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Borrowed or kept? How self-generation-first and direct-adoption AI workflows shape immediate unaided reasoning.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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6 authors.
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Abstract
Whether generative AI erodes the skills it assists is usually studied by counting how much people use it, and while the tool is still in hand. That design cannot separate cause from selection, or distinguish using AI from depending on it. We report a three-arm experiment (900 randomized; 659 in the primary analysis) that varies the manner of AI use against a no-AI anchor and measures performance 15-20 min later, once the tool has been removed. Participants wrote an argumentative essay under a self-generation-first autonomous workflow (commit one's own position and then interrogate AI), a direct-adoption dependent workflow, or no AI and then wrote a second, parallel essay with no AI available. Two blind raters scored reasoning quality, idea diversity, and originality. On the unaided task, dependent users reasoned worse than participants who had never used AI (adjusted difference = -0.38 on a 1-7 scale, a small effect,
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