Research area 01 · Active
Executive Offloading
How reliance on external tools and aids relates to executive functioning, decision-making and learning.
Overview
Question and approach.
Core question
When cognitive work is handed to an external tool, what happens to the executive processes that would otherwise have carried it?
Approach
Current research examines cognitive and executive offloading and how reliance on external tools may relate to executive functioning, critical thinking, learning and decision-making.
Focus
Offloading is treated here as an everyday behaviour rather than a deficit: notes, reminders, calculators, search and now generative systems all absorb parts of a task that would otherwise be held in mind.
The interest is in what that redistribution does to executive processes — planning, monitoring, inhibition and evaluation — and in whether the effects differ between routine tasks and tasks where judgement is the point.
Status
A manuscript on this work was under submission, but I found out that I had been officially scooped recently. Ah, the travails of publishing—While it’s a frustrating rite of passage, I do want to leave a note for the sceptics: aside from using AI to help manage the references, my manuscript was entirely human-crafted (I did do my PhD when ChatGPT was not around!!). The intellectual elbow grease is all mine.
A second manuscript — an offshoot of the work in the scooped manuscript — is currently under submission and awaiting peer review. Watch this space.
Evidence — Described on the public ORCID record; submission status supplied directly by Dr Paul Morrill.