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Accurate but Not Confident or Confident but Not Accurate? Cognitive Offloading Impairs Confidence Calibration in Human-AI Teams
Conference proceeding   Open access   Peer reviewed

Accurate but Not Confident or Confident but Not Accurate? Cognitive Offloading Impairs Confidence Calibration in Human-AI Teams

Charlotte Cheatle and Adrian Paul Banks
Proceedings of the 48th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2026), Vol.48(0), pp.1166-1173
48th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2026) (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 22/07/2026–25/07/2026)
2026

Abstract

Cognitive Offloading Human-AI Teaming AI-Assisted Decision Making Confidence Calibration Metacognition

Appropriate AI reliance requires users to accurately evaluate their own performance in order to discern whether to retain or defer responsibility. While underconfidence is a known driver of automation bias, little is known about how collaboration with AI itself influences users’ metacognition. We investigated how cognitive offloading different stages of the decision making process affects confidence calibration. Participants completed diagnostic decision-making tasks with varying levels of memory and judgement support. Overall, cognitive offloading impaired confidence calibration, with unaided decision makers showing the greatest alignment between confidence and accuracy. Importantly, offloading different cognitive processes produced distinct metacognitive biases: judgement offloading led to overconfidence, whereas combined offloading of memory and judgement processes led to underconfidence. These findings demonstrate that AI support can disrupt user confidence calibration in systematic ways, depending on the type and extent of cognitive delegation. The results highlight metacognitive miscalibration as a critical and underexplored consequence of human-AI collaboration.

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Cognitive Offloading to AI Distorts Confidence Calibration Effects of Memory and Judgement Support in AI-Assisted Decision Making508.82 kBDownloadView
Author's Accepted Manuscript Open Access CC BY V4.0

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