Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The tools we use change the way we think. Thus, the proliferation of generative AI underscores the importance of research on the cognitive implications of increasingly ubiquitous AI use. Collaboration with generative AI and other digital systems increases productivity. However, previous research has shown that AI exerts a homogenizing influence on users. This study extends the investigation of homogenization effects of digital collaboration to memory. We administer a memory task and ask participants to recall words while collaborating with generative AI, internet searches, or alone. We find that collaborating with digital systems homogenizes memory content towards words with greater lexical and category-dependent frequencies. Although the effect size is small, the repeated usage of digital systems compounds homogenization. Unchecked memory homogenization risks collective vulnerability, and has implications for recollection of past, present, and future experiences.