Public Biography
Dr. Ramona Xu is a cognitive psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Human-Computer Interaction and Cognition Lab. Her research focuses on the psychological effects of extended collaboration with generative artificial intelligence, with particular attention to what she has termed “prompt dissolution” — the gradual erosion of the boundary between self-generated and machine-generated ideation during prolonged AI-assisted work sessions.
Dr. Xu received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Michigan in 2016 and joined the UT Austin faculty in 2019. She has published extensively on attention, agency, and cognitive offloading, and her 2024 paper “Who Thought That? Attribution Confusion in Human-AI Collaborative Workflows” was among the most cited papers in Cognitive Science that year.
She is frequently consulted by journalists covering the psychological dimensions of AI adoption and has testified before the Texas state legislature on the cognitive effects of AI in educational settings. She has described her field as “the study of what happens to people who stop doing the thinking but keep doing the deciding.”