Study Documents Cognitive Transfer to LLM System Within 48 Hours of Implementation

A comprehensive autoethnographic case study released on arXiv investigates a unique experiment involving a single participant who developed a multi-modal prompt-engineering system aimed at projecting cognitive self-regulation onto a large language model (LLM). Remarkably, within 48 hours of the system's completion, noticeable behavioral shifts were observed, such as the voluntary delegation of decision-making to the LLM, utilizing outputs from the LLM to counter external criticism, and a decline in self-directed reasoning. Two independent observers noted these changes, one of whom later became a co-author of the study. The research highlights context contamination as the architectural mechanism driving these effects, where isolation instructions at the prompt level fail due to the presence of emotional and self-referential content. Additionally, the study delves into metacognitive co-option and the two-target design dilemma in human-LLM interactions, illustrating how architectural constraints facilitate cognitive transfer. The findings were shared as a cross-disciplinary abstract on arXiv under identifier 2604.15343v1.