Identify the mechanisms that produce residual human-state differences

Identify the interaction mechanisms that produce residual human-state differences, including the causal effects of assistance timing, feedback, disagreement, explanation, and reconstruction while holding AI capability as constant as possible.

Background

The four empirical cases document trajectory-relative residual differences but do not establish the mechanisms that generate them. The paper specifically calls for prospective manipulation of interaction trajectories so that mechanisms such as timing, feedback, disagreement, explanation, and reconstruction can be separated from differences in AI capability. This would move the framework from documenting residual states toward explaining how interaction policies generate them.

References

Several substantive questions consequently remain open. First, the present cases identify residual differences more clearly than the mechanisms producing them. Future work should manipulate interaction trajectories prospectively while holding AI capability as constant as possible, allowing the causal effects of timing, feedback, disagreement, explanation, or reconstruction to be isolated.

— What Human-AI Interaction Leaves Behind: Residual Human States -- A Trajectory-Based Framework and Multi-Study Analysis  (2610.18765 - Herrera-Poyatos et al., 13 Oct 2026) in Section 6, subsection “Limitations and future research”

Repeated interaction also raises a deeper trajectory question: residual effects may accumulate, reverse, or become path-dependent as earlier AI exposure changes how later assistance is processed.

— What Human-AI Interaction Leaves Behind: Residual Human States -- A Trajectory-Based Framework and Multi-Study Analysis  (2610.18765 - Herrera-Poyatos et al., 13 Oct 2026) in Section 6, subsection “Limitations and future research”