Brooke McNamara

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275 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Brooke McNamara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Speaking of Psychology · AI “de-skilling”: What happens when we offload our work to AI? With Brooke Macnamara, PhD · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

Sure.

So cognitive offloading isn't kind of an on-off switch.

So it depends on how we're engaging with the AI tool and how much of the work we're cognitively offloading.

For example, if someone is trying to learn a new skill, but in that process they're really just asking AI for the answer every time, they'll get some exposure.

They'll probably learn a little bit.

But not as much as if they were trying to engage in what are called desirable difficulties, right?

So if they are trying to generate the answer themselves or test themselves, what's called retrieval practice to try to remember the answers, they'll learn the skill better that way.

So if they completely offload, probably they won't learn that new skill to the same degree as if they didn't have the tool.

But there

Are other cases where you could use the AI to check your answer or give you examples, ways where you're interacting and engaging, and you're not just completely offloading all of the cognitive work, where you really are using it as a support system.

In which case there's evidence out there that suggests in some cases you do better if you have that AI support, or in

some cases you're at least not doing as poorly as if you are completely cognitively offloading.

So it really depends on how we're using it.

Right, right.

So there's always the question of are we losing critical thinking skills by offloading that part to AI?

Um and there's evidence that that maybe we are.

Interestingly, since we were just talking about Google and people having concerns about it, now there's been studies comparing Googling things to using AI.

And in

Those cases, so well, this is a study, I guess I should say.

We don't have a lot of data yet.

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