{"id":82154,"topic":"ai","source":"Los Angeles Times","title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","url_hash":"b278f069da275bebe5c4da85a460b852b4209b36","author":"","summary":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains Los Angeles Times","content":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.\nThe nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution. Earlier this week, a former engineer for OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI’s chief architects “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”\nIt’s been less than four years since the public debut of ChatGPT, the first widely adopted generative AI platform. Given the relative novelty of publicly-accessible generative AI platforms, the total body of research studies investigating their effect on children’s cognitive development is fairly small.\nBut the available data paints a worrisome picture of thwarted learning.\nWithout careful guardrails in place, children tend to use the platforms as shortcuts to answers, bypassing the messy, difficult cognitive processes that are essential for learning.\nResearchers watching young children’s brain activity as they interacted with ChatGPT saw less engagement in regions associated with attention and information processing than they did in adults doing the same task. High school students permitted to use ChatGPT as a study aide soared through practice questions, but performed worse on tests than peers without AI once the tool was taken away.\nOne researcher investigating AI’s effects on children has expressed concerns of “cognitive stunting” — critical thinking skills prohibited from developing, just as physical growth can be stymied by malnutrition.\nIt’s appropriate to be cautious, researchers said.\n“I believe this moratorium is the right decision with the current evidence we have,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies youth and AI.\n“These tools are still being built, evolving in technological capacity before our eyes, and designers are responding to current profit incentives in ways that may not always be aligned with promoting positive youth development,” she said. “Evidence in support of a particular tool’s benefits should be extremely clear before these tools are rolled out at scale for children and teens.”\nAdults’ performance on a given task tends to diminish the more they outsource that job to technology, a phenomenon known as skill erosion. It’s a trade-off that has accompanied virtually every new technological development. (According to Plato, Socrates famously groused that students’ preference for books over memorized text would “implant forgetfulness in their souls.”)\nBut generative AI has vastly broadened the range of tasks that humans can successfully outsource. That’s a boon to professionals looking for virtual assistance with work they already know how to do. For students who haven’t yet mastered a skill, it can be an obstacle to learning.\n“When young people systematically use AI to complete schoolwork or other thinking tasks, they are not offloading skills they already possess. They are shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” wrote Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.\nWinthrop coined the term “cognitive stunting” to describe this effect on children.\nJake Collective and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are launching a $5 million, five-year initiative\nThe limited research available offers some indications that children and adults process AI interactions differently.\nA team from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology carried out an experiment in which 15 6- and 7-year-olds and 16 adults first sat for a short test to assess their baseline creativity skills. Participants then did an exercise designing a store of their choice using ChatGPT, while fMRI scanners recorded their brain activity.\nFor adults, their creative output with ChatGPT was generally on par with the creativity level they’d shown on the test.\nChildren who scored high on the creativity test, however, produced imaginary stores no more creative than children who scored lower. The fMRI also detected less synchronized blood flow in regions of the children’s brains associated with attention and information processing than they did in the adults’.\nThe study was released on a preprint server and is still undergoing the process of peer review. Its scope is limited, but to co-author Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor and head of Technion’s Educational Neuroimaging Group, said the findings suggest that “six years old [is] probably too early to use generative AI tools,” she said. “When is a good time? We don’t know. More research is needed.”\nA paper published last year offers more insight into AI’s effect on older students. One group of high school students in Turkey were allowed to use a generative AI platform similar to ChatGPT when studying for a math test. A second group studied without AI access. A third was allowed to study with a modified AI platform designed by their teachers to offer hints without ever providing answers directly.\nThe students with AI access did great on practice questions, outperforming those without it by 48% (those using the general platform) and 127% (those using the tutor).\nWhen it came time to take an offline test, the students who used the general platform, which was capable of giving them the answers in practice, scored 17% lower than those with no AI. Those who used the AI tutor did as well — but no better — than AI-free kids.\nWhen left alone with a tool capable of doing practice questions for them, the students used AI “as an answer machine,” said co-author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.\nSungu is a supporter of cell phone bans in schools, and leans toward banning social media for children as well, he said. He has yet to see a paper demonstrating that AI access improves learning outcomes in children. At the same time, he is ambivalent about the efficacy of outright bans on school devices.\nIt isn’t that he thinks that children should have unlimited access to AI. Rather, a school device is the only place educators can directly control the material students are exposed to. A moratorium can’t prevent students from using ChatGPT and its ilk on home devices, but it does reduce opportunities to show them how to use it wisely.\nDriven by social media hype and a growing distrust of public health guidance, consumer demand for experimental peptides has exploded over the last decade.\n“The goal should be about making students use it for productive purposes, and that can only happen [by] interacting with students,” Sungu said.\nLAUSD officials will spend the coming months working on policy recommendations and guardrails to present to the school board at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson said.\nGiven the speed of AI’s evolution, it’s possible students will be grappling with even more powerful platforms before educators and policymakers have fully reckoned with the ones they already have, said Matthew Kopec, director of Harvard University’s Embedded EthiCS program.\n“The tools are evolving so quickly that students are effectively using very different tools by the time the possible negative effects of the old tools start appearing,” Kopec said. “I think we have many very good reasons to heavily regulate how generative AI tools are allowed to interact with our children.”","image_url":"https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/411a93c/2147483647/strip/true/crop/7517x3946+0+585/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F5b%2F1b%2F2003568c4c87854b75c8f375c52c%2F1425617-me-0320-ai-app-lausd-students-cmh-09.jpg","lang":"en","published_at":"2026-09-14T16:00:34+00:00","fetched_at":"2026-09-14T16:15:04+00:00","status":"read","starred":0,"extract_state":"ok","summary_auto":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage. The nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution.","cluster_id":3509407,"extract_retries":0,"extract_error":null,"contract_version":"news_item.v1","format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1","dedup_url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530,"usable_text_length":7795,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530}},"news_item":{"id":82154,"canonical_url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","source_url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","source_name":"Los Angeles Times","author":null,"published_at":"2026-09-14T16:00:34+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"rss_summary":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains Los Angeles Times","full_text":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.\nThe nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution. Earlier this week, a former engineer for OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI’s chief architects “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”\nIt’s been less than four years since the public debut of ChatGPT, the first widely adopted generative AI platform. Given the relative novelty of publicly-accessible generative AI platforms, the total body of research studies investigating their effect on children’s cognitive development is fairly small.\nBut the available data paints a worrisome picture of thwarted learning.\nWithout careful guardrails in place, children tend to use the platforms as shortcuts to answers, bypassing the messy, difficult cognitive processes that are essential for learning.\nResearchers watching young children’s brain activity as they interacted with ChatGPT saw less engagement in regions associated with attention and information processing than they did in adults doing the same task. High school students permitted to use ChatGPT as a study aide soared through practice questions, but performed worse on tests than peers without AI once the tool was taken away.\nOne researcher investigating AI’s effects on children has expressed concerns of “cognitive stunting” — critical thinking skills prohibited from developing, just as physical growth can be stymied by malnutrition.\nIt’s appropriate to be cautious, researchers said.\n“I believe this moratorium is the right decision with the current evidence we have,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies youth and AI.\n“These tools are still being built, evolving in technological capacity before our eyes, and designers are responding to current profit incentives in ways that may not always be aligned with promoting positive youth development,” she said. “Evidence in support of a particular tool’s benefits should be extremely clear before these tools are rolled out at scale for children and teens.”\nAdults’ performance on a given task tends to diminish the more they outsource that job to technology, a phenomenon known as skill erosion. It’s a trade-off that has accompanied virtually every new technological development. (According to Plato, Socrates famously groused that students’ preference for books over memorized text would “implant forgetfulness in their souls.”)\nBut generative AI has vastly broadened the range of tasks that humans can successfully outsource. That’s a boon to professionals looking for virtual assistance with work they already know how to do. For students who haven’t yet mastered a skill, it can be an obstacle to learning.\n“When young people systematically use AI to complete schoolwork or other thinking tasks, they are not offloading skills they already possess. They are shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” wrote Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.\nWinthrop coined the term “cognitive stunting” to describe this effect on children.\nJake Collective and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are launching a $5 million, five-year initiative\nThe limited research available offers some indications that children and adults process AI interactions differently.\nA team from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology carried out an experiment in which 15 6- and 7-year-olds and 16 adults first sat for a short test to assess their baseline creativity skills. Participants then did an exercise designing a store of their choice using ChatGPT, while fMRI scanners recorded their brain activity.\nFor adults, their creative output with ChatGPT was generally on par with the creativity level they’d shown on the test.\nChildren who scored high on the creativity test, however, produced imaginary stores no more creative than children who scored lower. The fMRI also detected less synchronized blood flow in regions of the children’s brains associated with attention and information processing than they did in the adults’.\nThe study was released on a preprint server and is still undergoing the process of peer review. Its scope is limited, but to co-author Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor and head of Technion’s Educational Neuroimaging Group, said the findings suggest that “six years old [is] probably too early to use generative AI tools,” she said. “When is a good time? We don’t know. More research is needed.”\nA paper published last year offers more insight into AI’s effect on older students. One group of high school students in Turkey were allowed to use a generative AI platform similar to ChatGPT when studying for a math test. A second group studied without AI access. A third was allowed to study with a modified AI platform designed by their teachers to offer hints without ever providing answers directly.\nThe students with AI access did great on practice questions, outperforming those without it by 48% (those using the general platform) and 127% (those using the tutor).\nWhen it came time to take an offline test, the students who used the general platform, which was capable of giving them the answers in practice, scored 17% lower than those with no AI. Those who used the AI tutor did as well — but no better — than AI-free kids.\nWhen left alone with a tool capable of doing practice questions for them, the students used AI “as an answer machine,” said co-author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.\nSungu is a supporter of cell phone bans in schools, and leans toward banning social media for children as well, he said. He has yet to see a paper demonstrating that AI access improves learning outcomes in children. At the same time, he is ambivalent about the efficacy of outright bans on school devices.\nIt isn’t that he thinks that children should have unlimited access to AI. Rather, a school device is the only place educators can directly control the material students are exposed to. A moratorium can’t prevent students from using ChatGPT and its ilk on home devices, but it does reduce opportunities to show them how to use it wisely.\nDriven by social media hype and a growing distrust of public health guidance, consumer demand for experimental peptides has exploded over the last decade.\n“The goal should be about making students use it for productive purposes, and that can only happen [by] interacting with students,” Sungu said.\nLAUSD officials will spend the coming months working on policy recommendations and guardrails to present to the school board at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson said.\nGiven the speed of AI’s evolution, it’s possible students will be grappling with even more powerful platforms before educators and policymakers have fully reckoned with the ones they already have, said Matthew Kopec, director of Harvard University’s Embedded EthiCS program.\n“The tools are evolving so quickly that students are effectively using very different tools by the time the possible negative effects of the old tools start appearing,” Kopec said. “I think we have many very good reasons to heavily regulate how generative AI tools are allowed to interact with our children.”","excerpt":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage. The nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution.","extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530,"usable_text_length":7795,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530}}},"display_formats":["compact","card","full","digest_section","json"]},"daily_stack_record":{"title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","summary":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage. The nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution.","source":"Los Angeles Times","date":"2026-09-14T16:00:34+00:00","content":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.\nThe nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution. Earlier this week, a former engineer for OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI’s chief architects “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”\nIt’s been less than four years since the public debut of ChatGPT, the first widely adopted generative AI platform. Given the relative novelty of publicly-accessible generative AI platforms, the total body of research studies investigating their effect on children’s cognitive development is fairly small.\nBut the available data paints a worrisome picture of thwarted learning.\nWithout careful guardrails in place, children tend to use the platforms as shortcuts to answers, bypassing the messy, difficult cognitive processes that are essential for learning.\nResearchers watching young children’s brain activity as they interacted with ChatGPT saw less engagement in regions associated with attention and information processing than they did in adults doing the same task. High school students permitted to use ChatGPT as a study aide soared through practice questions, but performed worse on tests than peers without AI once the tool was taken away.\nOne researcher investigating AI’s effects on children has expressed concerns of “cognitive stunting” — critical thinking skills prohibited from developing, just as physical growth can be stymied by malnutrition.\nIt’s appropriate to be cautious, researchers said.\n“I believe this moratorium is the right decision with the current evidence we have,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies youth and AI.\n“These tools are still being built, evolving in technological capacity before our eyes, and designers are responding to current profit incentives in ways that may not always be aligned with promoting positive youth development,” she said. “Evidence in support of a particular tool’s benefits should be extremely clear before these tools are rolled out at scale for children and teens.”\nAdults’ performance on a given task tends to diminish the more they outsource that job to technology, a phenomenon known as skill erosion. It’s a trade-off that has accompanied virtually every new technological development. (According to Plato, Socrates famously groused that students’ preference for books over memorized text would “implant forgetfulness in their souls.”)\nBut generative AI has vastly broadened the range of tasks that humans can successfully outsource. That’s a boon to professionals looking for virtual assistance with work they already know how to do. For students who haven’t yet mastered a skill, it can be an obstacle to learning.\n“When young people systematically use AI to complete schoolwork or other thinking tasks, they are not offloading skills they already possess. They are shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” wrote Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.\nWinthrop coined the term “cognitive stunting” to describe this effect on children.\nJake Collective and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are launching a $5 million, five-year initiative\nThe limited research available offers some indications that children and adults process AI interactions differently.\nA team from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology carried out an experiment in which 15 6- and 7-year-olds and 16 adults first sat for a short test to assess their baseline creativity skills. Participants then did an exercise designing a store of their choice using ChatGPT, while fMRI scanners recorded their brain activity.\nFor adults, their creative output with ChatGPT was generally on par with the creativity level they’d shown on the test.\nChildren who scored high on the creativity test, however, produced imaginary stores no more creative than children who scored lower. The fMRI also detected less synchronized blood flow in regions of the children’s brains associated with attention and information processing than they did in the adults’.\nThe study was released on a preprint server and is still undergoing the process of peer review. Its scope is limited, but to co-author Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor and head of Technion’s Educational Neuroimaging Group, said the findings suggest that “six years old [is] probably too early to use generative AI tools,” she said. “When is a good time? We don’t know. More research is needed.”\nA paper published last year offers more insight into AI’s effect on older students. One group of high school students in Turkey were allowed to use a generative AI platform similar to ChatGPT when studying for a math test. A second group studied without AI access. A third was allowed to study with a modified AI platform designed by their teachers to offer hints without ever providing answers directly.\nThe students with AI access did great on practice questions, outperforming those without it by 48% (those using the general platform) and 127% (those using the tutor).\nWhen it came time to take an offline test, the students who used the general platform, which was capable of giving them the answers in practice, scored 17% lower than those with no AI. Those who used the AI tutor did as well — but no better — than AI-free kids.\nWhen left alone with a tool capable of doing practice questions for them, the students used AI “as an answer machine,” said co-author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.\nSungu is a supporter of cell phone bans in schools, and leans toward banning social media for children as well, he said. He has yet to see a paper demonstrating that AI access improves learning outcomes in children. At the same time, he is ambivalent about the efficacy of outright bans on school devices.\nIt isn’t that he thinks that children should have unlimited access to AI. Rather, a school device is the only place educators can directly control the material students are exposed to. A moratorium can’t prevent students from using ChatGPT and its ilk on home devices, but it does reduce opportunities to show them how to use it wisely.\nDriven by social media hype and a growing distrust of public health guidance, consumer demand for experimental peptides has exploded over the last decade.\n“The goal should be about making students use it for productive purposes, and that can only happen [by] interacting with students,” Sungu said.\nLAUSD officials will spend the coming months working on policy recommendations and guardrails to present to the school board at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson said.\nGiven the speed of AI’s evolution, it’s possible students will be grappling with even more powerful platforms before educators and policymakers have fully reckoned with the ones they already have, said Matthew Kopec, director of Harvard University’s Embedded EthiCS program.\n“The tools are evolving so quickly that students are effectively using very different tools by the time the possible negative effects of the old tools start appearing,” Kopec said. “I think we have many very good reasons to heavily regulate how generative AI tools are allowed to interact with our children.”","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530,"usable_text_length":7795,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530}},"tags":[]},"fallback_formats":["markdown","json","html"],"actions":{"read":"/item/82154","export_markdown":"/api/items/82154/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/82154/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains"},"formats":{"full":{"id":82154,"title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","source":"Los Angeles Times","author":null,"published_at":"2026-09-14T16:00:34+00:00","locale":"en","topic":"ai","tags":[],"excerpt":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage. The nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution.","full_text":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.\nThe nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution. Earlier this week, a former engineer for OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI’s chief architects “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”\nIt’s been less than four years since the public debut of ChatGPT, the first widely adopted generative AI platform. Given the relative novelty of publicly-accessible generative AI platforms, the total body of research studies investigating their effect on children’s cognitive development is fairly small.\nBut the available data paints a worrisome picture of thwarted learning.\nWithout careful guardrails in place, children tend to use the platforms as shortcuts to answers, bypassing the messy, difficult cognitive processes that are essential for learning.\nResearchers watching young children’s brain activity as they interacted with ChatGPT saw less engagement in regions associated with attention and information processing than they did in adults doing the same task. High school students permitted to use ChatGPT as a study aide soared through practice questions, but performed worse on tests than peers without AI once the tool was taken away.\nOne researcher investigating AI’s effects on children has expressed concerns of “cognitive stunting” — critical thinking skills prohibited from developing, just as physical growth can be stymied by malnutrition.\nIt’s appropriate to be cautious, researchers said.\n“I believe this moratorium is the right decision with the current evidence we have,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies youth and AI.\n“These tools are still being built, evolving in technological capacity before our eyes, and designers are responding to current profit incentives in ways that may not always be aligned with promoting positive youth development,” she said. “Evidence in support of a particular tool’s benefits should be extremely clear before these tools are rolled out at scale for children and teens.”\nAdults’ performance on a given task tends to diminish the more they outsource that job to technology, a phenomenon known as skill erosion. It’s a trade-off that has accompanied virtually every new technological development. (According to Plato, Socrates famously groused that students’ preference for books over memorized text would “implant forgetfulness in their souls.”)\nBut generative AI has vastly broadened the range of tasks that humans can successfully outsource. That’s a boon to professionals looking for virtual assistance with work they already know how to do. For students who haven’t yet mastered a skill, it can be an obstacle to learning.\n“When young people systematically use AI to complete schoolwork or other thinking tasks, they are not offloading skills they already possess. They are shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” wrote Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.\nWinthrop coined the term “cognitive stunting” to describe this effect on children.\nJake Collective and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are launching a $5 million, five-year initiative\nThe limited research available offers some indications that children and adults process AI interactions differently.\nA team from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology carried out an experiment in which 15 6- and 7-year-olds and 16 adults first sat for a short test to assess their baseline creativity skills. Participants then did an exercise designing a store of their choice using ChatGPT, while fMRI scanners recorded their brain activity.\nFor adults, their creative output with ChatGPT was generally on par with the creativity level they’d shown on the test.\nChildren who scored high on the creativity test, however, produced imaginary stores no more creative than children who scored lower. The fMRI also detected less synchronized blood flow in regions of the children’s brains associated with attention and information processing than they did in the adults’.\nThe study was released on a preprint server and is still undergoing the process of peer review. Its scope is limited, but to co-author Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor and head of Technion’s Educational Neuroimaging Group, said the findings suggest that “six years old [is] probably too early to use generative AI tools,” she said. “When is a good time? We don’t know. More research is needed.”\nA paper published last year offers more insight into AI’s effect on older students. One group of high school students in Turkey were allowed to use a generative AI platform similar to ChatGPT when studying for a math test. A second group studied without AI access. A third was allowed to study with a modified AI platform designed by their teachers to offer hints without ever providing answers directly.\nThe students with AI access did great on practice questions, outperforming those without it by 48% (those using the general platform) and 127% (those using the tutor).\nWhen it came time to take an offline test, the students who used the general platform, which was capable of giving them the answers in practice, scored 17% lower than those with no AI. Those who used the AI tutor did as well — but no better — than AI-free kids.\nWhen left alone with a tool capable of doing practice questions for them, the students used AI “as an answer machine,” said co-author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.\nSungu is a supporter of cell phone bans in schools, and leans toward banning social media for children as well, he said. He has yet to see a paper demonstrating that AI access improves learning outcomes in children. At the same time, he is ambivalent about the efficacy of outright bans on school devices.\nIt isn’t that he thinks that children should have unlimited access to AI. Rather, a school device is the only place educators can directly control the material students are exposed to. A moratorium can’t prevent students from using ChatGPT and its ilk on home devices, but it does reduce opportunities to show them how to use it wisely.\nDriven by social media hype and a growing distrust of public health guidance, consumer demand for experimental peptides has exploded over the last decade.\n“The goal should be about making students use it for productive purposes, and that can only happen [by] interacting with students,” Sungu said.\nLAUSD officials will spend the coming months working on policy recommendations and guardrails to present to the school board at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson said.\nGiven the speed of AI’s evolution, it’s possible students will be grappling with even more powerful platforms before educators and policymakers have fully reckoned with the ones they already have, said Matthew Kopec, director of Harvard University’s Embedded EthiCS program.\n“The tools are evolving so quickly that students are effectively using very different tools by the time the possible negative effects of the old tools start appearing,” Kopec said. “I think we have many very good reasons to heavily regulate how generative AI tools are allowed to interact with our children.”","reading_time_min":6,"extraction":{"state":"ok","confidence":0.9,"error":null,"explanation":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530,"usable_text_length":7795,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530}}},"quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530,"usable_text_length":7795,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530}},"actions":{"read":"/item/82154","export_markdown":"/api/items/82154/export?format=markdown","export_json":"/api/items/82154/export?format=json","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains"}},"digest":{"id":82154,"title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","source":"Los Angeles Times","topic":"ai","published_at":"2026-09-14T16:00:34+00:00","excerpt":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Click here to listen to this article - Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27…","quality_bucket":"high","quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","reading_time_min":6,"cluster_id":3509407},"card":{"display_title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","subtitle":"Los Angeles Times · 2026-09-14","summary":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Click here to listen to this article - Los Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of…","badges":["quality:high"],"links":{"read":"/item/82154","original":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","diagnose":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains"},"quality_warning":null},"export":{"title":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains - Los Angeles Times","url":"https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","summary":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage. The nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution.","source":"Los Angeles Times","date":"2026-09-14T16:00:34+00:00","content":"‘Cognitive stunting’ and the potential threat generative AI poses for children’s brains\n- Click here to listen to this article \n- \nLos Angeles Unified School District recently announced it will bar student use of generative artificial intelligence on school devices for the 2026-27 academic year, joining New York City Public Schools in limiting children’s access to a technology no one yet knows how to safely manage.\nThe nation’s two largest school districts made the move at a pivotal moment in the technology’s evolution. Earlier this week, a former engineer for OpenAI and Anthropic warned that AI’s chief architects “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”\nIt’s been less than four years since the public debut of ChatGPT, the first widely adopted generative AI platform. Given the relative novelty of publicly-accessible generative AI platforms, the total body of research studies investigating their effect on children’s cognitive development is fairly small.\nBut the available data paints a worrisome picture of thwarted learning.\nWithout careful guardrails in place, children tend to use the platforms as shortcuts to answers, bypassing the messy, difficult cognitive processes that are essential for learning.\nResearchers watching young children’s brain activity as they interacted with ChatGPT saw less engagement in regions associated with attention and information processing than they did in adults doing the same task. High school students permitted to use ChatGPT as a study aide soared through practice questions, but performed worse on tests than peers without AI once the tool was taken away.\nOne researcher investigating AI’s effects on children has expressed concerns of “cognitive stunting” — critical thinking skills prohibited from developing, just as physical growth can be stymied by malnutrition.\nIt’s appropriate to be cautious, researchers said.\n“I believe this moratorium is the right decision with the current evidence we have,” said Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies youth and AI.\n“These tools are still being built, evolving in technological capacity before our eyes, and designers are responding to current profit incentives in ways that may not always be aligned with promoting positive youth development,” she said. “Evidence in support of a particular tool’s benefits should be extremely clear before these tools are rolled out at scale for children and teens.”\nAdults’ performance on a given task tends to diminish the more they outsource that job to technology, a phenomenon known as skill erosion. It’s a trade-off that has accompanied virtually every new technological development. (According to Plato, Socrates famously groused that students’ preference for books over memorized text would “implant forgetfulness in their souls.”)\nBut generative AI has vastly broadened the range of tasks that humans can successfully outsource. That’s a boon to professionals looking for virtual assistance with work they already know how to do. For students who haven’t yet mastered a skill, it can be an obstacle to learning.\n“When young people systematically use AI to complete schoolwork or other thinking tasks, they are not offloading skills they already possess. They are shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” wrote Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.\nWinthrop coined the term “cognitive stunting” to describe this effect on children.\nJake Collective and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention are launching a $5 million, five-year initiative\nThe limited research available offers some indications that children and adults process AI interactions differently.\nA team from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology carried out an experiment in which 15 6- and 7-year-olds and 16 adults first sat for a short test to assess their baseline creativity skills. Participants then did an exercise designing a store of their choice using ChatGPT, while fMRI scanners recorded their brain activity.\nFor adults, their creative output with ChatGPT was generally on par with the creativity level they’d shown on the test.\nChildren who scored high on the creativity test, however, produced imaginary stores no more creative than children who scored lower. The fMRI also detected less synchronized blood flow in regions of the children’s brains associated with attention and information processing than they did in the adults’.\nThe study was released on a preprint server and is still undergoing the process of peer review. Its scope is limited, but to co-author Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor and head of Technion’s Educational Neuroimaging Group, said the findings suggest that “six years old [is] probably too early to use generative AI tools,” she said. “When is a good time? We don’t know. More research is needed.”\nA paper published last year offers more insight into AI’s effect on older students. One group of high school students in Turkey were allowed to use a generative AI platform similar to ChatGPT when studying for a math test. A second group studied without AI access. A third was allowed to study with a modified AI platform designed by their teachers to offer hints without ever providing answers directly.\nThe students with AI access did great on practice questions, outperforming those without it by 48% (those using the general platform) and 127% (those using the tutor).\nWhen it came time to take an offline test, the students who used the general platform, which was capable of giving them the answers in practice, scored 17% lower than those with no AI. Those who used the AI tutor did as well — but no better — than AI-free kids.\nWhen left alone with a tool capable of doing practice questions for them, the students used AI “as an answer machine,” said co-author Alp Sungu, an assistant professor of operations, information and decisions at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.\nSungu is a supporter of cell phone bans in schools, and leans toward banning social media for children as well, he said. He has yet to see a paper demonstrating that AI access improves learning outcomes in children. At the same time, he is ambivalent about the efficacy of outright bans on school devices.\nIt isn’t that he thinks that children should have unlimited access to AI. Rather, a school device is the only place educators can directly control the material students are exposed to. A moratorium can’t prevent students from using ChatGPT and its ilk on home devices, but it does reduce opportunities to show them how to use it wisely.\nDriven by social media hype and a growing distrust of public health guidance, consumer demand for experimental peptides has exploded over the last decade.\n“The goal should be about making students use it for productive purposes, and that can only happen [by] interacting with students,” Sungu said.\nLAUSD officials will spend the coming months working on policy recommendations and guardrails to present to the school board at the end of the academic year, a spokesperson said.\nGiven the speed of AI’s evolution, it’s possible students will be grappling with even more powerful platforms before educators and policymakers have fully reckoned with the ones they already have, said Matthew Kopec, director of Harvard University’s Embedded EthiCS program.\n“The tools are evolving so quickly that students are effectively using very different tools by the time the possible negative effects of the old tools start appearing,” Kopec said. “I think we have many very good reasons to heavily regulate how generative AI tools are allowed to interact with our children.”","confidence":0.9,"diagnostics_url":"/api/diagnose?url=https%3A//www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains","quality_bucket":"high","failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"quality_reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","quality_profile":{"profile_version":"extraction_quality.v2","bucket":"high","confidence":0.9,"failure_kind":"none","retryable":false,"retry_after_attempts":0,"reason":"High confidence: full text extraction produced 7795 characters.","operator_guidance":{"severity":"ok","recommended_action":"trust_full_text","next_step":"Use the extracted full text as the primary article source.","operator_label":"Ready","can_retry":false,"can_use_summary":false,"diagnostics_required":false},"content_depth":{"contract_version":"content_depth.v1","category":"full_text","label":"Full text","has_full_text":true,"has_summary":true,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530,"usable_text_length":7795,"source_field":"content"},"legacy_collapsed":false,"signals":{"extract_state":"ok","extract_error":null,"extract_retries":0,"content_length":7795,"summary_length":530}},"tags":[],"format_contract_version":"news_item_formats.v1"}}}