Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the mental demands of a task: writing a list, setting a reminder, asking a device.
Where it comes from
Psychologists Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert defined and reviewed the concept in 2016.¹ Their examples range from tilting your head to read rotated text to storing information in a phone. Whether we offload, they note, often depends on how confident we feel about our own memory, a feeling that can be wrong in either direction.
Where it goes wrong
Offloading is often discussed as a threat, in the spirit of Nicholas Carr's 2008 essay "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Much of it frees attention for more valuable work. The real question is what we lose when we hand off a skill we are still trying to build. In a 2025 survey of 319 knowledge workers by Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon, those with more confidence in generative AI reported less critical thinking in their work, while those with more confidence in themselves reported more. The data are self-reported and correlational.²
Talent Takeaway
Agree with your team which skills people should keep practicing on their own, especially while they are still learning them, and which tasks can go to the machine. Revisit the list as people grow.
¹ Risko, E. F., & Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Cognitive offloading. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 676–688. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002
² Lee, H.-P., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025). The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: Self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.
Further reading: Carr, N. (2008, July/August). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic.