Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cognitive offloading becomes increasingly essential with the advancement of AI-powered technology, as it helps to free up mental resources and optimize overall performance. To better understand how children offload cognitive resources to external intelligent agents, the present study attempted to examine the use of social cognitive offloading in children and adults in a working memory task. 6-year-old children (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) completed a working memory task that required remembering 5 or 7 colored circles. We investigated whether and how children’s and adults’ working memory performance changed in the presence of a virtual agent who always remembers two of the colors within a trial (that participants could ask for help with). Results showed that both children’s and adults’ memory performance benefited from the introduction of a virtual agent. Furthermore, the use of the cognitive offloading strategy was dependent on the memory load.