Children Show More Selective Cognitive Offloading After First Being Compelled to Offload Indiscriminately

With the rise of wearable technologies, mobile devices and artificial intelligence comes a growing pressure to understand downstream effects of cognitive offloading on children's future thinking and behavior. Here, we explored whether compelling children to use an indiscriminate cognitive offloading strategy affects their subsequent strategy selection. Six- to 9-year-olds (N = 128) completed a task where manual rotation of stimuli sometimes offloaded mental rotation demand and other times did not. In phase 1, some children were compelled to use manual rotation indiscriminately, whereas others could only use mental rotation. In phase 2, where children could freely choose their strategy, older children who were compelled to use manual rotation in phase 1 were significantly more selective in their strategy use, rotating the stimuli relatively more frequently when this behavior would offload cognitive demand than when it would not. These results provide preliminary evidence that pre-exposure to indiscriminate cognitive offloading can promote selectivity in children's subsequent strategy use, though this selectivity may reflect a desire to avoid cognitive effort rather than improve task performance.