Critical thinking is an essential human skill. Despite the importance of critical thinking, research reveals that our reasoning ability suffers from personal biases and cognitive resource limitations, leading to potentially dangerous outcomes. This paper presents the novel idea of AI-framed Questioning that turns information relevant to the AI classification into questions to actively engage users’ thinking and scaffold their reasoning process. We conducted a study with 204 participants comparing the effects of AI-framed Questioning on a critical thinking task; discernment of logical validity of socially divisive statements. Our results show that compared to no feedback and even causal AI explanations of an always correct system, AI-framed Questioning significantly increase human discernment of logically flawed statements. Our experiment exemplifies a future style of Human-AI co-reasoning system, where the AI becomes a critical thinking stimulator rather than an information teller.

Information about a person’s engagement and attention might be a valuable asset in many settings including work situations, driving, and learning environments. To this end, we propose the first prototype of a device called AttentivU—a system that uses a wearable system which consists of two main components. Component 1 is represented by an EEG headband used to measure the engagement of a person in real-time. Component 2 is a scarf, which provides subtle, haptic feedback (vibrations) in real-time when the drop in engagement is detected. We tested AttentivU in two separate studies with 48 adults. The participants were engaged in a learning scenario of either watching three video lectures on different subjects or participating in a set of three face-to-face lectures with a professor. There were three conditions administrated during both studies: (1) biofeedback, meaning the scarf (component 2 of the system) was vibrating each time the EEG headband detected a drop in engagement; (2) random feedback, where the vibrations did not correlate or depend on the engagement level detected by the system, and (3) no feedback, when no vibrations were administered. The results show that the biofeedback condition redirected the engagement of the participants to the task at hand and improved their performance on comprehension tests.

People have to remember an ever-expanding volume of information. Wearables that use information capture and retrieval for memory augmentation can help but can be disruptive and cumbersome in real-world tasks, such as in social settings. To address this, we developed Memoro, a wearable audio-based memory assistant with a concise user interface. Memoro uses a large language model (LLM) to infer the user’s memory needs in a conversational context, semantically search memories, and present minimal suggestions. The assistant has two interaction modes: Query Mode for voicing queries and Queryless Mode for on-demand predictive assistance, without explicit query. Our study of (N=20) participants engaged in a real-time conversation, demonstrated that using Memoro reduced device interaction time and increased recall confidence while preserving conversational quality. We report quantitative results and discuss the preferences and experiences of users. This work contributes towards utilizing LLMs to design wearable memory augmentation systems that are minimally disruptive.