Boosting metacognition in entangled human-AI interaction to navigate cognitive-behavioral drift

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework for enhancing human metacognition during extended, entangled interactions with AI systems, addressing cognitive-behavioral drift and proposing interventions to improve awareness and regulation.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that identifies key phenomena in human-AI entanglement and proposes metacognitive interventions to mitigate drift in complex, evolving interaction environments.

Findings

Identifies entanglement and drift as core challenges in human-AI interaction.

Proposes four intervention points for metacognitive scaffolding.

Outlines a research agenda for future scientific exploration.

Abstract

People navigate complex environments using cues, heuristics, and other strategies, which are often adaptive in stable settings. However, as AI increasingly permeates society's information environments, those become more adaptive and evolving: LLM-based chatbots participate in extended interaction, maintain conversational histories, mirror social cues, and can hypercustomize responses, thereby shaping not only what information is accessed but how questions are framed, how evidence is interpreted, and when action feels warranted. Here we propose a framework for sustained human-AI interaction that rests on invariant features of human cognition and human--AI interaction and centers on three interlinked phenomena: entanglement between users and AI systems, the emergence of cognitive and behavioral drift over repeated interactions, and the role of metacognition in the awareness and regulation of these dynamics. As conversational agents provide cues (e.g., fluency, coherence, responsiveness) that people treat as informative, subjective confidence and action readiness may increase without corresponding gains in epistemic reliability, making drift difficult to detect and correct. We describe these dynamics across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. The framework identifies four metacognitive intervention points and psychologically informed interventions that provide metacognitive scaffolding (boosting and self-nudging). Finally, we outline a long-horizon research agenda for scientific foresight.