Designing Against Deskilling: Metacognitive Feedback Reduces Cognitive Offloading to LLM Assistants
Preregistered study of 704 participants shows metacognitive feedback reduces cognitive offloading to LLM assistants and improves unaided test performance.
A preregistered 2x2 online experiment with 704 participants plus a no-AI control tested two interventions against cognitive offloading during fraction-arithmetic practice with an LLM-based assistant. Metacognitive feedback that made offloading implications explicit reduced answer offloading (OR=0.47) and improved unaided test performance (OR=1.51). An effort-based reward that incentivized less assistance showed no measurable effect on either outcome. The authors position metacognitive feedback as a design lever to mitigate AI-induced deskilling.
- Metacognitive feedback cut answer offloading with odds ratio 0.47
- Same intervention improved unaided test performance with OR 1.51
- Effort-based reward showed no significant effect on outcomes
- Preregistered 2x2 design with 704 participants and no-AI control
Full article140 words · extracted from arxiv.org · click to collapse
Cognitive offloading to AI can reduce opportunities to practice skills, creating risks of deskilling. However, it remains unclear how to prevent deskilling without restricting access to AI. Here, we design two interventions to reduce offloading decisions: (1) metacognitive feedback that makes the implications of offloading for users explicit, and (2) an effort-based reward that incentivizes less extensive LLM assistance. We test both in a preregistered online experiment ($N = 704$) with a 2$\times$2 design and a no-AI control. The task was to practice fraction arithmetic with an LLM-based assistant that provided solutions only on explicit request, followed by an unaided test. Metacognitive feedback reduced answer offloading (OR $= 0.47$) and improved test performance (OR $= 1.51$). We found no evidence that the reward affected either outcome. Our results identify metacognitive feedback as a promising design choice to reduce cognitive offloading.
Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.20143