GenAI use weakens effort adjustment to incentives on subsequent unaided reasoning¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · causal r2 · q3 · i1 small
Currency · newest study 2026 · checked against its sources 2026-10-20 (automated, 2 of 2 entries) · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i1 On Stage 2 completion time, the effect of incentives depended on prior genAI access: incentives slowed participants without prior genAI access but did not differ among those with prior genAI access. → Dawid Ratajczyk 2026 q3 i? The genAI × incentive effect on Stage 2 completion time varied with question difficulty, emerging only for difficult questions. → Dawid Ratajczyk 2026 (2)

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 · i1 · causal · r?

Preregistered 2×2 ANOVA on fourth-root-transformed Stage 2 completion times in the lab experiment. The quoted interaction, η²p = .028, shows incentive effects on time investment depended on prior genAI access; post hoc tests showed incentives slowed only no-genAI participants.

"The interaction be- tweenpriorgenAIaccessandincentiveswasalsosignificant (𝐹(1,153) = 4.38,𝑝=.038,𝜂 2 𝑝 =.028)."

Dawid Ratajczyk 2026 (2)¶

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/

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Exploratory linear mixed-effects regression of Stage 2 per-question completion time with participants and items as random effects. The quoted three-way interaction shows the genAI × incentive pattern was significant only at high question difficulty; no standardised effect size is printed.

"The model showed a significant three-way interactionbetweenpriorgenAIaccess,incentiveandquestion difficulty (𝑏= −0.51,𝑆𝐸= 0.24,𝑡(1869) = −2.08,𝑝=.038)."

Discussion¶

Learner Variables¶

• Executive Function — outcome: instruction changes it

Related Claims¶

• Evidence suggests over-reliance on generative AI may negatively affect students' self-regulated learning behaviors, potentially harming retention and transfer to novel contexts — the general claim this finding bears on, with the studies behind it
• Participants deprived of relevant relational knowledge in Stage 1 take longer on the subsequent network-reasoning task — related
• Prior genAI use and incentives show no clear effects on later memory retention — related
• Prior genAI access shows only exploratory evidence of poorer subsequent unaided reasoning, within the no-incentive condition, and no preregistered main effect — related
• Prior genAI access and incentives interact on perceived difficulty of the memory test — related
• Performance incentives increase time invested in the assisted reasoning task — related
• Access to an LLM assistant during practice did not significantly lower subsequent unaided test performance — related