By Marcelina Horrillo Husillos, Journalist and Correspondent at The European Business Review
AI tools, including everything from virtual assistants and recommendation algorithms to complex decision-support systems and AI agents, have become integral to daily functioning, promising enhanced efficiency, personalised experiences, and unprecedented access to information. —However, alongside these benefits, there is growing concern about the potential cognitive impacts and the impact on critical thinking of AI on users during the process of delegating cognitive tasks to external resources.
A recent MIT Media Lab study reported that “excessive reliance on AI-driven solutions” may contribute to “cognitive atrophy” and the shrinking of critical thinking abilities. When being asked to ChatGPT whether AI can make us dumber or smarter, it answered, “It depends on how we engage with it: as a crutch or a tool for growth.”
If students default to AI-generated responses rather than reasoning through problems, they can weaken their cognitive flexibility and information evaluation skills.
Artificial intelligence has transformed various aspects of our lives, from healthcare and finance to entertainment and education. But although AI tools offer speed and efficiency, they also raise concerns about cognitive offloading—the process of delegating cognitive tasks to external aids. As reliance on AI grows, experts warn that it could diminish critical-thinking skills.
Critical thinking requires active cognitive engagement to analyse, evaluate, and synthesise the information effectively to make reasoned decisions. It involves various cognitive processes, including problem-solving, decision-making, and reflective thinking, which are crucial for navigating complex and dynamic environments.
However, growing evidence shows that over-reliance on AI tools can lead to cognitive offloading, occurring when individuals delegate cognitive tasks to external channels, reducing their engagement in deep, reflective thinking.
Researchers at Oregon also reported significant declines in several areas:
- A 66% decline in reflection
- A 41% drop in critical thinking
- A 21% decline in the perceived need to understand concepts
Those findings suggest some users increasingly feel less need to understand why something works if they can quickly get an answer.
As Professor Anita Sarma describes, AI is becoming a kind of “cognitive crutch,” where students stop engaging deeply with problems because the technology provides immediate responses.
Impact on critical thinking
As we’re exposed to vast amounts of information and have easy access to highly sophisticated resources for accessing data on a quick click, it becomes increasingly tempting to let the software do the thinking for us. This could have unintended consequences, such as eroding our critical thinking skills and declining our overall cognitive ability. This fear is not unfounded.
A recent study by Gerlich (2025) found a negative correlation between frequent AI usage and critical-thinking abilities, suggesting that individuals who rely heavily on automated tools may struggle with independent reasoning.
AI tools often filter content based on prior interactions, reinforcing existing biases and limiting exposure to diverse perspectives. Interestingly, the study found a non-linear relationship between AI use and cognitive impact—moderate AI usage did not significantly affect critical thinking, but excessive reliance led to diminishing cognitive returns.
According to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA, just a 10-minute session with an AI assistant can significantly reduce users’ capacity for reasoning.
The findings are also in line with a study Microsoft published last year that examined cognitive decline among knowledge workers and found that the more people rely on AI, the worse they perform when asked to work without support. It also echoes a study out of Poland, which found that while doctors are better at spotting cancer risks with AI assistance, they perform worse than the no-AI baseline once that assistance is removed.
We learn when the work is hard
In learning environments, AI-driven tools can streamline knowledge acquisition, but they may also discourage students from engaging in problem-solving and analytical exercises. If students default to AI-generated responses rather than reasoning through problems, they can weaken their cognitive flexibility and information evaluation skills.
In professional environments, over-reliance on AI in decision-making processes can lead to weaker analytical abilities. Algorithmic bias further complicates matters, as individuals may fail to critically assess the underlying assumptions in AI recommendations, leading to flawed decision-making. Industries that rely on AI-generated insights, such as finance, healthcare, and law, must balance AI’s benefits with the need for human judgment.
Psychologists argue that gaining knowledge and mastering new skills depend heavily on struggle, friction and mental effort, which are crucial to the cognitive work of learning, remembering and strengthening connections in the brain.
The brain is a lot like a muscle: It takes genuine hard work to see gains. Without challenging that muscle, it won’t grow bigger, says Brian W. Stone, Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Boise State University.
Using technology to effectively offload cognitive workouts can have a detrimental effect on learning and memory and can cause people to misread their own understanding or abilities, leading to what psychologists call metacognitive errors. Research has shown that habitually offloading car navigation to GPS may impair spatial memory and that using an external source like Google to answer questions makes people overconfident in their own personal knowledge and memory.
Strategies to preserve critical thinking in an AI-dominated world
As per the studies, suggesting that overreliance on AI tools could bring problems linked to creativity, attention span, critical thinking, and memory, strategies to use AI tools and manage the content they produce sensibly are suggested:
1. Educational interactions
- Schools and universities must emphasize active learning and critical evaluation of AI-generated content.
- Teaching metacognitive skills can help students assess the quality and reliability of AI-generated outputs.
- Assignments should incorporate problem-solving exercises without AI assistance to encourage independent thinking.
2. Conscious and balanced usage
- AI should complement rather than replace human reasoning. Encouraging a human-AI collaboration model can ensure users remain actively engaged in decision-making.
- Organizations should establish ethical AI guidelines to promote unbiased and transparent AI recommendations.
3. Compare and contrast the AI content
- Encouraging professionals and students to verify AI-generated content through multiple sources helps develop scepticism and analytical skills.
- Exercises in memory retention, debate, and logical reasoning can reinforce cognitive engagement.
- Workplaces should design decision-making processes that require employees to reflect on AI-generated insights before acting on them.
Conclusion
AI’s increasing role in cognitive processes presents both opportunities and risks. While AI presents opportunities for humanity to flourish by enhancing efficiency and accessibility, it’s important to understand the risks to human cognition.
Over-reliance on AI tools can lead to cognitive offloading, occurring when individuals delegate cognitive tasks to external channels, reducing their engagement in deep, reflective thinking.
Recent research demonstrates the need for educational interventions, balanced AI usage, and independent thinking strategies to mitigate AI’s cognitive costs. As society navigates AI’s expanding influence, fostering a culture of critical engagement will be crucial to ensuring that technological convenience does not come at the expense of intellectual independence.
Over-reliance on AI at a professional level can manifest to the detriment of both the individual and the organisation, as if decisions made and work are a copy and paste from the AI output, it creates serious risks because of the lack of real reasoning behind these actions. These will lack maturity and will possess serious accountability issues when individuals and organisations.
AI creates great possibilities for expanding human capabilities to make individuals and entities more effective, skilled, and valuable, but only if it is used sensibly, avoiding dependency on the tools, exercising the right and the professional and moral obligation of filtering the information that is being provided, placing the individual’s reasoning and criteria above anything else.
