Monday, April 20 / 12:00pm to 1:00pm Pacific Time
Matt Beane | Precision Proactivity: Measuring Cognitive Load in Real-World AI-Assisted Work
- Hybrid
- Seminar
The DEL Seminar Series is proud to host a diverse roster of bright minds from around the world to discuss various subjects surrounding economics and technology.
On Monday, March 16 Matt Beane, Associate Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will stop by the Lab for our Seminar Series.
This is a hybrid event, streamed live on Zoom. Members of the Stanford community may register to attend in-person.
Abstract
Systems like ChatGPT and Claude assist billions through proactive dialogue—offering unsolicited, task-relevant information. Drawing on Cognitive Load Theory, we study how cognitive load shapes performance in AI assisted knowledge work.
We recruited 34 financial professionals to complete a complex valuation task using GPT-4o and developed a transcript-based framework estimating intrinsic and extraneous load from computational indicators anchored in a task decomposition and knowledge graph. Across 1,178 participant–subtask observations, AI-generated content usage is positively associated with quality, while extraneous load shows the largest negative association—roughly three times that of intrinsic load.
Mediation reveals a compensatory pathway partially offsetting but not eliminating load-related deficits. Extraneous load persists within speakers and spills asymmetrically to model responses. Model-initiated task switching is the strongest predictor of decline. Expertise moderates these dynamics: less experienced professionals face larger penalties and derive greater marginal gains from AI-generated content, yet are not those who most increase uptake under load.
Matt Beane
Digital Fellow
Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we can use across the broader world of work. His award-winning research has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on the Ted stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his doctoral studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to help found and fund Humatics, a full-stack IoT startup. Beane is an assistant professor in the Technology Management Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a digital fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Institute for the Digital Economy.
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