Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
Nataliya Kosmyna and seven co-authors had 54 participants write essays over three sessions with an LLM, with a search engine, or with no tools at all, while EEG measured their brain activity; 18 returned for a fourth session in which the LLM and Brain-only participants swapped conditions. "Brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support": it was strongest in the Brain-only group and weakest for LLM users, who also reported low ownership of their essays and "fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior". In the fourth session, participants moving from the LLM to no tools showed under-engagement of alpha and beta networks. Over the four months of the study, the authors write, the LLM group "performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring".
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