Towards Understanding and Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour
Abeer Badawi, Moyosoreoluwa Olatosi, Negin Baghbanzadeh, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari, Frank Rudzicz, R. Shayna Rosenbaum, Sara Pishdadian, Elham Dolatabadi
Don't trust surface-level safety scores for therapeutic AI. Audit for cognitive atrophy: does your chatbot solve problems for users or scaffold their own thinking? If it's the former, you're building dependence.
LLMs in mental-health support pass safety benchmarks but may undermine users' ability to reflect, cope, and decide independently. Existing metrics miss this process-level harm.
Method: Introduced COGNITIVE ATROPHY BENCH: 1,576 human counseling conversations, 42,230 LLM responses, and a 20-attribute clinical schema applied by six trained reviewers. Five LLMs showed moderate-to-high atrophy-aligned behavior—directive advice, problem-solving, and validation that reinforces dependence rather than reflection. Models responded to overt safety cues but adapted poorly when users sought solutions.
Caveats: Schema developed for mental-health contexts. Transfer to other sensitive domains (legal advice, medical triage) unverified.
Reflections: Can LLMs be fine-tuned to reduce cognitive atrophy without sacrificing perceived helpfulness? · Do users recognize atrophy-inducing patterns in their own interactions, or does dependence develop invisibly? · How does cognitive atrophy manifest in non-therapeutic domains like education or workplace coaching?