USC computer science researchers are studying how humans and AI interact to enhance creative and critical thinking, led by Souti (Rini) Chattopadhyay through a new research project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Launched this month, the five-year project is supported by an approximately $600,000 NSF CAREER Award. The project’s objective is to design interaction guidelines that enable stronger human-AI synergy and shared agency. Researchers will examine how people interact with AI tools to identify interactions that best spark creativity and critical thinking, while pinpointing gaps in current human-AI interactions. The study will examine professionals across three fields: software engineering, journalism and medicine. Participants from each field will be asked to complete job-related tasks using AI-powered agentic systems, alongside a control group performing the same tasks without AI. Researchers will monitor participants’ brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) to map how ideas are formed and connected during the thinking process. Chattopadhyay emphasized that the core goal is to create a synergistic relationship between humans and AI, allowing each to complement the other’s strengths.