Not all cognitive offloading is equal: distinguishing dependent and autonomous offloading to generative AI
Qiuhan Zhu; Xiangnan Li; Yiang Dong; Pengcheng Chang; Mengmeng Fan · 2026 · Frontiers in Psychology
WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate
The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.
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 disti
Abstract by Qiuhan Zhu; Xiangnan Li; Yiang Dong; Pengcheng Chang; Mengmeng Fan, Frontiers in Psychology (2026) — licensed CC BY 4.0.
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Metadata source: OpenAlex · DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1878629