Is It Mine or Not Mine? Cognitive Offloading to Generative AI and Concern over the Erosion of Cognitive Ownership

Abstract

Cognitive offloading—delegating cognitive work to external tools—is basic to human cognition, but generative AI (GenAI) amplifies it radically: entire cognitive products can now be produced on request. This sharpens a question about agency over one’s own thinking: when cognition is habitually offloaded, does its product still feel like one’s own? We surveyed 239 pre-service teachers, operationalizing the felt loss of cognitive ownership as concern over the erosion of teaching-design subjectivity (TSC)—the metacognitive appraisal that AI-assisted work is not genuinely one’s own and that independent capacity is declining. Guided by the Interaction of Person-Affect-Cognition-Execution (I-PACE) model, we tested whether AI anxiety/fear of missing out (affective) and impulsivity (self-regulatory) relate to this concern through behavioral GenAI dependency—habitual offloading. In a structural equation model with bias-corrected bootstrapping, dependency strongly predicted TSC and partially mediated the effect of AI anxiety; impulsivity raised dependency but showed a suppression pattern (a positive indirect effect offset by a null total effect), and the model explained 35% of the variance in the concern. Habitual offloading—that is, GenAI dependency—rather than generic AI use, accompanies the metacognitive loss of cognitive ownership.