arXiv:2604.02783v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: AI chatbots are increasingly stepping into roles as collaborators or teachers in analyzing, visualizing, and reasoning through data and domain problem. Yet, AI’s default assistant mode with its comprehensive and one-off responses may undermine opportunities for practitioners to develop literacy through their own thinking, inducing cognitive passivity. Drawing on evidence from empirical studies and theories, we argue that disrupting cognitive passivity necessitates a nuanced approach: rather than simply making AI promote deliberative thinking, there is a need for more dynamic and adaptive strategy through cognitive alignment — a framework that characterizes effective human-AI interaction as a function of alignment between users’ cognitive demand and AI’s interaction mode. In the framework, we provide the mapping between AI’s interaction mode (transmissive or deliberative) and users’ cognitive demand (receptive or deliberative), otherwise leading to either cognitive passivity or friction. We further discuss implications and offer open questions for future research on data literacy.
When to Call an Apple Red: Humans Follow Introspective Rules, VLMs Don’t
arXiv:2604.06422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when Vision-Language Models (VLMs) will behave unexpectedly, whether models can reliably predict their own behavior, and if models adhere