Time-matched unlocking did not reproduce the engagement state that triggered unlocks: most Time-Matched Unlock participants received access before meeting the discourse criteria¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2026 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Among the 60 Time-Matched Unlock participants who received an unlock, only 22 (36.7%) had met the discourse criteria when Tell-me became available; 38 (63.3%) had not, including 16 with empty drafts. → Xiaotian Su 2026

Evidence¶

Xiaotian Su 2026¶

Xiaotian Su, Laura Rimell, Jiazheng Li, Amal Rannen-Triki, Ulrich Paquet, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Rida Qadri, Daphne Ippolito and Piotr Mirowski. (2026). Who Thinks First? Designing Productive Friction with Engage-to-Unlock GenAI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01518 doi:10.48550/arxiv.2610.01518

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Unlocking-status analysis in Results §4.1.1 of the N=398 experiment: 98 of 107 Engage-to-Unlock participants (91.6%) unlocked Tell-me; in Time-Matched Unlock, 34 of 94 never received an unlock before submission, partly due to a client-side timer stopping at 20 minutes.

"Thus, although Time-Matched Unlock reproduced the timing of unlocks from the Engage-to-Unlock condition, it did not reproduce the engagement state that triggered those unlocks."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Engage-to-Unlock participants completed passage evaluation faster and with higher accuracy-per-time efficiency than both AI-access comparison conditions — related
• Engage-to-Unlock participants submitted more prompts than both Standard Chatbot and Time-Matched Unlock participants — related