The hybrid mind: Generative AI and the reconfiguration of cognitive, social, and emotional development in the AI-native child

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The rapid diffusion of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reorganizing the ecology in which cognition, social understanding, agency, authorship, and emotional regulation develop. This critical integrative review treats GenAI as a developmentally consequential interactive artifact: responsive, adaptive, linguistically fluent, multimodal, and increasingly embedded in learning, play, and communication. Drawing on sociocultural, constructivist, ecological, extended-cognition, AI-literacy, and hybrid-learning perspectives, we introduce the Hybrid Mind Framework. It defines human-AI coupling as recurrent, contingent coordination and distinguishes immediate AI-supported performance from durable changes in unaided competence, competence during coupling, trust, support-seeking, or authorship. Four domains are considered: cognitive hybridization, social-epistemic calibration, affective scaffolding and support-seeking, and agency/authorship. The review integrates emerging GenAI evidence with research on earlier responsive technologies and differentiates early childhood, middle childhood, early adolescence, and later adolescence. Existing evidence indicates possible short-term affordances and risks, but long-term developmental effects remain largely untested. Rather than treating GenAI as either a pedagogical miracle or a developmental threat, we propose that AI be designed and governed as part of children's developmental ecology. Testable propositions and age-calibrated implications distinguish observed findings from theory-derived and precautionary claims.