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The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has transformed numerous aspects of daily life, yet its impact on critical thinking remains underexplored. This study investigates the relationship between AI tool usage and critical thinking skills, focusing on cognitive offloading as a mediating factor. Utilising a mixed-method approach, we conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with 666 participants across diverse age groups and educational backgrounds. Quantitative data were analysed using ANOVA and correlation analysis, while qualitative insights were obtained through thematic analysis of interview transcripts. The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants. Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage. These results highlight the potential cognitive costs of AI tool reliance, emphasising the need for educational strategies that promote critical engagement with AI technologies. This study contributes to the growing discourse on AI’s cognitive implications, offering practical recommendations for mitigating its adverse effects on critical thinking. The findings underscore the importance of fostering critical thinking in an AI-driven world, making this research essential reading for educators, policymakers, and technologists.

How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory. However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically placed objects, and technologies such as smartphone alerts. This is known as ‘intention offloading’. Despite the progress in our understanding of brain-based prospective memory, we know much less about the role of intention offloading in individuals’ ability to fulfil delayed intentions. Here, we review recent research into intention offloading, with a particular focus on how individuals decide between storing intentions in internal memory versus external reminders. We also review studies investigating how intention offloading changes across the lifespan and how it relates to underlying brain mechanisms. We conclude that intention offloading is highly effective, experimentally tractable, and guided by metacognitive processes. Individuals have systematic biases in their offloading strategies that are stable over time. Evidence also suggests that individual differences and developmental changes in offloading strategies are driven at least in part by metacognitive processes. Therefore, metacognitive interventions could play an important role in promoting individuals’ adaptive use of cognitive tools.

Many animals manipulate their environments in ways that appear to augment cognitive processing. Adult humans show remarkable flexibility in this domain, typically relying on internal cognitive processing when adequate but turning to external support in situations of high internal demand. We use calendars, calculators, navigational aids and other external means to compensate for our natural cognitive shortcomings and achieve otherwise unattainable feats of intelligence. As yet, however, the developmental origins of this fundamental capacity for cognitive offloading remain largely unknown. In two studies, children aged 4–11 years ( n = 258) were given an opportunity to manually rotate a turntable to eliminate the internal demands of mental rotation––to solve the problem in the world rather than in their heads. In study 1, even the youngest children showed a linear relationship between mental rotation demand and likelihood of using the external strategy, paralleling the classic relationship between angle of mental rotation and reaction time. In study 2, children were introduced to a version of the task where manually rotating inverted stimuli was sometimes beneficial to performance and other times redundant. With increasing age, children were significantly more likely to manually rotate the turntable only when it would benefit them. These results show how humans gradually calibrate their cognitive offloading strategies throughout childhood and thereby uncover the developmental origins of this central facet of intelligence.

Past research conducted primarily in young adults has demonstrated the utility of cognitive offloading for benefitting performance of memory-based tasks, particularly at high memory loads. At the same time, older adults show declines in a variety of memory abilities, including subtle changes in short-term memory, suggesting that cognitive offloading could also benefit performance of memory-based tasks in this group. To this end, 94 participants (62 young adults, 32 older adults) were tested on a retrospective audiovisual short-term memory task in two blocked conditions. Offloading was permitted in the offloading choice condition but not in the internal memory condition. Performance was improved for both age groups in the offloading choice condition compared to the internal memory condition. Moreover, the choice to use the offloading strategy was similar across age groups at high memory loads, and use of the offloading strategy benefitted performance for young and older adults similarly. These data suggest that older adults can make effective use of cognitive offloading to rescue performance of memory-based activities, and invites future research on the benefits of cognitive offloading for older adults in other, more complex tasks where age-related memory impairment is expected to be more prominent.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence tools in education has emerged as a transformative approach to enhancing learning outcomes, particularly in the context of sustainable development goals (SDG4). Therefore, the present study investigates the connection between generative artificial intelligence tool usage (GenAITU) and academic achievement (AA) in the context of SDG4. We assessed the mediating role of shared metacognition (SMC) and cognitive offloading (COL) in this relationship among preservice teachers (PSTs). The indicators, including performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), facilitating conditions (FC), and use behavior (UB), are derived from adapting the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) for GenAITU. The authors surveyed 465 students from five universities in Wuhan, China, using a 7-point Likert scale through a time-lag design. Statistical analysis was performed through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), to determine the relationship between variables. Findings indicated that two components of GenAITU, namely PE and UB, showed significant positive associations with AA, while the other two, EE and FC, did not show significant and positive relationships with AA. Results also showed that three dimensions of GenAITU, namely EE, FC, and UB have a positive and significant association with SMC while PE has a positive and significant connection with SMC. All four components of GenAITU like PE, EE, FC, and UB have positive and significant links with COL. SMC and COL have a positive and significant relationship with AA. Results also indicated that SMC mediated the connections between GenAITU (EE, FC, and UB) and AA. Outcomes also indicated that COL mediated the connections between GenAITU (PE, EE, FC, and UB) and AA. The current study shows that SMC and COL were strong mediators of the association between GenAITU and AA. The results of our study provide guidance to teachers, curriculum planners, and university management to successfully integrate GenAITU into the education for PSTs.

Various modern tools, such as smartphones, allow for cognitive offloading (i.e., the externalization of cognitive processes). In this study, we examined the use and consequences of cognitive offloading in demanding situations in which people perform multiple tasks concurrently—mimicking the requirements of daily life. In a preregistered study, we adapted the dual-task paradigm so that one of the tasks allowed for cognitive offloading. As a primary task, our participants ( N = 172) performed the pattern copy task—a highly demanding working memory task that allows for offloading at various degrees. In this task, we manipulated the temporal costs of offloading. Concurrently, half of the participants responded to a secondary N -back task. As our main research question, we investigated the impact of offloading behavior on secondary task performance. We observed that more pronounced offloading in the condition without temporal costs was accompanied by a more accurate performance in the N -back task. Furthermore, the necessity to respond to the N -back task increased offloading behavior. These results suggest an interplay between offloading and secondary task performance: in demanding situations, individuals increasingly use cognitive offloading, which releases internal resources that can then be devoted to improving performance in other, concurrent tasks.

To acquire and process information, performers can frequently rely on both internal and extended cognitive strategies. However, after becoming acquainted with two strategies, performers in previous studies exhibited a pronounced behavioral preference for just one strategy, which we refer to as perseveration . What is the origin of such perseveration? Previous research suggests that a prime reason for cognitive strategy choice is performance: Perseveration could reflect the preference for a superior strategy as determined by accurately monitoring each strategy’s performance. However, following our preregistered hypotheses, we conjectured that perseveration persisted even if the available strategies featured similar performances. Such persisting perseveration could be reasonable if costs related to decision making, performance monitoring, and strategy switching would be additionally taken into account on top of isolated strategy performances. Here, we used a calibration procedure to equalize performances of strategies as far as possible and tested whether perseveration persisted. In Experiment 1 , performance adjustment of strategies succeeded in equating accuracy but not speed. Many participants perseverated on the faster strategy. In Experiment 2 , calibration succeeded regarding both accuracy and speed. No substantial perseveration was detected, and residual perseveration was conceivably related to metacognitive performance evaluations. We conclude that perseveration on cognitive strategies is frequently rooted in performance: Performers willingly use multiple strategies for the same task if performance differences appear sufficiently small. Surprisingly, other possible reasons for perseveration like effort or switch cost avoidance, mental challenge seeking, satisficing, or episodic retrieval of previous stimulus-strategy-bindings, were less relevant in the present study.

Intention offloading refers to the use of external reminders to help remember delayed intentions (e.g., setting an alert to help you remember when you need to take your medication). Research has found that metacognitive processes influence offloading such that individual differences in confidence predict individual differences in offloading regardless of objective cognitive ability. The current study investigated the cross-domain organization of this relationship. Participants performed two perceptual discrimination tasks where objective accuracy was equalized using a staircase procedure. In a memory task, two measures of intention offloading were collected, (1) the overall likelihood of setting reminders, and (2) the bias in reminder-setting compared to the optimal strategy. It was found that perceptual confidence was associated with the first measure but not the second. It is shown that this is because individual differences in perceptual confidence capture meaningful differences in objective ability despite the staircase procedure. These findings indicate that intention offloading is influenced by both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive signals. They also show that even when task performance is equalized via staircasing, individual differences in confidence cannot be considered a pure measure of metacognitive bias.

Despite the long history and pervasiveness of cognitive offloading as a memory strategy, the memorial fate of offloaded information is not well understood. Recent work has suggested that offloading information may engage similar mechanisms as instructions to forget (e.g., directed forgetting). In the present investigation, we test this prediction by examining the serial position effect for offloaded information. Previous research has demonstrated that “forget” instructions can eliminate the primacy effect while leaving an intact recency effect. Across two experiments, participants completed a number of free recall trials using an external aid and then a final recall trial without the external aid. We compared a group that was expecting to use the aid for the final trial (offloading) with a group that was not (no-offloading). We found a memory impairment for offloaded items that was characterized by a reduced primacy effect but a typical recency effect, similar to what has been reported in research on intentional/directed forgetting.

The photo-taking-impairment effect is observed when photographed information is less likely to be remembered than nonphotographed information. Three experiments examined whether this effect persists when multiple photos are taken. Experiment 1 used a within-subjects laboratory-based design in which participants viewed images of paintings and were instructed to photograph them once, five times, or not at all. Participants’ memory was measured using a visual detail test, and the photo-taking-impairment effect was observed when participants took multiple photos. Experiment 2 examined the photo-taking-impairment effect using a between-subjects design. Participants either photographed all of the paintings they saw once, five times, or not at all, before being tested on their memory for the paintings. The photo-taking-impairment effect was observed in both photo-taking conditions relative to the no photo baseline. Experiment 3 replicated this pattern of results even when participants who took multiple photos were instructed to take five unique photos. These findings indicate that the photo-taking-impairment effect is robust, occurring even when multiple photos are taken, and after nonselective photo-taking.