How AI Affects Researcher Agency and Cognitive Offloading (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: During my presentation, the two concepts I will be talking about is researcher agency and cognitive offloading. So in simple terms, when it comes to researcher agency, just think about this as the control that you have in doing your research. So when you're doing qualitative research, there are actions and decisions that you have to make, right? So having control in the action and decision that you're going to make is very important. Nowadays, the control that we have in doing our qualitative research is somewhat threatened by AI, and I think we have to be aware of that. Another concept that I'll be talking about is cognitive offloading. Cognitive offloading is thinking about giving part of your mental tasks, things that you have to do mentally, to a tool so that you'll be able to focus more on issues that are more important. Or think about it as using a tool to help you to reduce specific mental activity that you have to do when you are doing your research. One example is that using qualitative analysis software to help you to organize the course and the theme that you have. Instead of doing it manually, which may be a little bit challenging, right, you are using a software to help you to organize. So you offload some of your mental activities to this tool so that you get time and focus on making sense of your data, interpreting and addressing your research question that you have. So these two are the concepts I'm going to talk about.