Every participant wore an EEG cap to trace real-time mind exercise. The experiment ran for 4 months, with every pupil writing three essays, and a fourth session the place some swapped their assigned technique.
Sadly, the outcomes have been precisely what you may anticipate. College students who wrote their essays with none exterior assist confirmed the very best mind exercise, particularly in areas tied to reminiscence, creativity, and semantic processing. Those that used search engines like google and yahoo confirmed much less exercise however nonetheless engaged their brains greater than the group utilizing the AI chatbot. The ChatGPT group confirmed the bottom mind exercise of all, with as much as a 55% drop in neural connectivity in comparison with the unaided group, as measured by a way referred to as Dynamic Directed Switch Perform. (This system tracks how info strikes throughout totally different elements of the mind and is taken into account a superb marker for govt perform, consideration, and semantic processing.)
It will get worse. When researchers requested college students to recall or summarize what that they had written, the genAI-assisted group remembered much less and felt much less possession of their work. Within the closing session, when college students who had used the tech have been instantly requested to put in writing with out it, their efficiency and mind engagement lagged behind those that had began out unaided.