> The findings backed up what anecdotes and surveys have increasingly found in recent years: An overreliance on AI for answers erodes our cognitive fitness.

What is our cognitive fitness without our tools? How capable would we be at intellectual tasks if you remove computers, search engines and other things we now take for granted?

It's clear to me our overall output is better with those tools, and better with AI. So the comparison the paper is trying to make is disingenuous, because it tries to compare a baseline without any modern tools (ie, solving fractions by hand) to a result where the best tools are suddenly removed. But these tools are here to stay, and my cognitive fitness has adapted to their continued existence.

How well would these people doing fractions by hand perform if math notation could not be used? Or if the most common method for solving fractions on paper was suddenly disallowed?