B
Cognition & Offloading
6 plates
- B.06 Cognitive Load Theory Sweller's framework — three kinds of load on working memory, and what each one tells us about when AI helps and when it gets in the way.
- B.07 Cognitive Offloading Externalizing memory and computation to tools — and what it costs the mind doing the offloading.
- B.08 Transactive Memory and the Machine Wegner's idea that couples and groups divide the work of remembering — applied, with caution, to the relationship between a person and an always-available AI partner.
- B.09 AI-Induced Cognitive Atrophy The disuse hypothesis applied to the mind — what happens to mental skills that AI now does for us, and what the early empirical evidence shows.
- B.10 Critical Thinking in the Age of LLMs The 2024 Microsoft / Carnegie Mellon study, what it found about heavy generative-AI use, and the deeper question it forces — what is critical thinking, and how would we know if it were eroding?
- B.11 Distributed Cognition Reconsidered Hutchins, Clark, and the extended-mind tradition — a philosophical resource for thinking about humans and AI as a single cognitive system, with one warning attached.