Is it time to measure cognitive stunting?

Source Domain: www.brookings.edu

For the past two years, I have been deeply engaged—through leading the Brookings Global Task Force on AI and Education—in examining generative artificial intelligence and what it means for students’ learning and development. Throughout this process—conducting interviews, reviewing studies, and debating with colleagues—one issue has consistently troubled me: how to accurately describe the risk AI poses to children’s thinking skills.

Generative AI is a learning tool like none we have ever seen. It can generate ideas, write, design, compose music and poetry, and train itself to improve. Precisely because of this power, many have sounded the alarm about its potential to encourage cognitive offloading among young people. Our task force raised this concern as well. In our report, we described the risk as follows:

“The risk stems from what study participants view as a straightforward progression: AI tools are more likely to foster dependence. As students increasingly use these tools, and ‘offload’ an increasing amount of their cognitive tasks to these tools, a positive feedback loop emerges where they see positive results in terms of grades and in time and effort saved. These outcomes then create increased dependence on AI tools, increased ‘cognitive offloading,’ and increased ‘cognitive decline’” (p. 56).

At the time, my coauthors and I debated how best to describe this phenomenon. In truth, we have never before encountered a moment in which, across so many domains, the task of thinking itself can be so easily outsourced. We ultimately used the terms cognitive offloading and cognitive decline because that is how participants described their experiences. But neither term fully captures the risk we are facing.

Human beings have always cognitively offloaded as we invent new tools. This is how I can walk into a grocery store rather than forage for food—something my distant ancestors surely could do better than I can. And, having…

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