Asian Journal of Current Research

Artificial intelligence has moved quickly from a specialist tool to an everyday presence, changing how people gather, process, store, and recall information. At the heart of this shift lies a familiar psychological process now operating under new conditions: cognitive offloading, the practice of handing mental work to external tools, environments, or agents so as to lighten the load on one's own mind. People have always done this to some degree, but the reasoning and generative capacities of today's AI systems place pressures on human cognition that older theories of tool use never had to account for. This critical review draws together empirical and theoretical work from cognitive psychology, human factors research, educational science, and AI ethics to examine what AI-assisted cognitive offloading is doing to the mind across five interrelated areas: memory and information retrieval, attentional control, metacognition, decision-making, and psychological wellbeing. The picture that emerges is mixed. There is evidence of weakened memory consolidation, increased automation bias, shifts in how people judge their own competence, and patterns resembling digital dependency, alongside genuine gains in productivity and reduced cognitive strain under the right conditions. None of these effects appears uniform; they vary with age, expertise, digital literacy, and a person's habits of self-monitoring. Drawing on cognitive load theory, the extended mind hypothesis, and self-determination theory, the review argues that AI assistance is neither simply good nor simply bad for human thinking — its effects depend on how AI systems are designed, the circumstances in which they are used, and how deliberately people manage their place in everyday cognitive life. The discussion closes with implications for education, professional training, clinical psychology, and AI governance, and identifies where future research is most needed.