GenAI access reduces perceived difficulty of the assisted reasoning task¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r3 · q3
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Participants with genAI access rated the chunk-based reasoning task as less difficult than participants without genAI access. → Dawid Ratajczyk 2026

Evidence¶

Dawid Ratajczyk 2026¶

Dawid Ratajczyk, Agata Dymarska, Adam Matłoka, Michał Tomczyk, Małgorzata Wiącek. (2026). Thinking With AI, Reasoning Without It: Cognitive Offloading to Generative AI Weakens Effort Regulation. Preprint. https://osf.io/59qtm/ doi:10.31234/osf.io/83jum_v1

q3 · i? · causal · r3

Stage 1 perceived difficulty, self-reported on a 7-point scale in the same preregistered lab experiment. A 2×2 ANOVA showed a significant main effect of genAI access; the quoted means show lower difficulty ratings in the genAI group, with no standardised effect size printed for this contrast.

"Participants in the no-genAI group reported higher perceived difficulty (𝑀= 4.71,𝑆𝐷= 1.42) than participants in the genAI group (𝑀= 4.17,𝑆𝐷= 1.48; Figure5)."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Prior genAI access and incentives interact on perceived difficulty of the memory test — related
• Self-reported mental effort increased less across tasks in the ChatGPT condition while perceived difficulty rose equally in both groups — related
• AI assistance reduces subjective mental effort across all tasks even when it does not reduce completion time, dissociating time and effort — related
• Prior genAI use and incentives show no clear effects on later memory retention — related