An illustration of the top of the statue of The Thinker by Rodin. There is a nest in his head, with three chicks sticking out, and their parent bird flying above.

Tools for Thought

Better thinking through AI

Vision

Much AI research focuses on solving specific tasks for people – generating content or automating processes. While such systems may be powerful, there are risks that this approach may bring to human cognition. They may impact the way people think and therefore learn, build skills, and grow expertise for example.

The Tools for Thought (T4T) team aims to put human cognition at the heart of our systems. Our goal is to help researchers and systems builders to focus not just on automation, but on augmentation, imagining how AI might help people to think better. To this end, we research the impact of AI on aspects of cognition and use this to design and build systems that support individual and collective intentionality, enhance skills in critical thinking, and develop cultures of creativity and experimentation.

We imagine that AI can enhance human cognition, so that:

as well as getting the job done, it helps us better understand and figure out the job.
as well as creating content, it helps us think more critically and with more insight throughout an entire workflow.
as well as seeking speed and efficiency, it helps us create outcomes that are more effective and of higher quality because they are the product of better answers from better questions.
as well as augmenting individual cognition and tasks, it augments collective cognition and workflows.
as well as automating known processes, it helps organisations predict and explore the unknown.

Research

Our research looks at how cognition can be supported and scaffolded by interacting with a tool for thought, as well as how it can be undermined by AI systems. It will be grounded in theories of cognition including:

metacognition
reflective and critical thinking
divergent and convergent thinking
learning, recall, and understanding
planning
individual and distributed thinking
decision-making

Outputs of T4T will include principles and guidelines for supporting cognition in any user experience, as well as systems and new technologies that stand as practical instantiations of what it means to support better thinking using AI. These may be technical in nature, focusing for example on methods for tuning models, model explainability and coordinating multi-agent systems.

This is a venn diagram that shows 10 types of thinking that the Tools for Thought team are interested in. — Some of the Types of Thought we are interested in.

Workstreams

The Tools for Thought team are exploring a broad range of themes, outlined in the table below.

Workstream	Description \| Owner
Critical Thinking with AI	How might we design interfaces to promote critical thinking about task and AI output when working with generative AI \| Advait Sarkar
Diversity of Thought with AI	Can AI agents support conversations with users that are rich, meaningful and well rounded, and that give humans agency over the discussion? \| Pratik Ghosh
Explanations from AI	How might we enable better AI explanations for LLMs by providing user control over their characteristics and formation? \| Ian Drosos
AI for Intentional Meetings	How might we leverage generative AI to encourage self reflection and self awareness around collaboration, in order to make meetings more intentional? \| Sean Rintel
Learning & Understanding with AI	What impact do generative AI tools have on people’s understanding and memory of what they are doing – for example, when they write? Using this research, how can AI tools be designed so that they provably augment human cognition and help build core skills and capabilities? \| Abigail Sellen / Leon Reicherts
Task decomposition with AI for data analysis	How might we create interfaces that support task decomposition in the context of data analysis, as well as provide affordances that allow for verification? \| Jack Williams
Metacognition & AI	How do generative AI systems impose metacognitive demands on users, and how might they instead incorporate metacognitive support strategies? \| Lev Tankelevitch
Workflows & Collaborative Intent with AI	How are complex collaborative intents formed? How are they formed and how do they evolve over time? \| Britta Burlin
Creating with AI	How can we give people rich agency in the ways they participate in human-AI collaborative creativity? \| Gonzalo Ramos

People

The Tools for Thought team is interdisciplinary, mixing experts in social science, computer science, engineering, and design. Our workstreams reflect this mix, combining depth in user research, cutting-edge technology, and new user experiences.