Holding the Place: Toward Personalized Cognitive Accessibility Through Human–AI Collaboration

Digital memory tools can preserve information without restoring the circumstances in which someone can use it. Reminders can identify unfinished tasks without making those tasks easier to resume. For individuals who depend heavily on externally supported thinking, the resulting gap may affect access to existing knowledge and skills rather than possession of them. This paper proposes personalized cognitive accessibility as a research and design objective for conversational AI: not simply answering, remembering, or completing tasks, but adaptively supporting a person’s ability to recover context, think through interaction, exercise judgment, and continue work on their own terms.

The proposal draws on extended and distributed cognition, cognitive offloading, interruption research, autobiographical remembering, interactive scaffolding, and emerging personalized conversational systems. It is illustrated by a longitudinal case involving lifelong externalized thinking, difficult task reentry, and AI-assisted writing, tax oversight, reflection, and development of a continuity-oriented information system. Twelve purposively selected conversation episodes include productive resumptions, substantive correction, completed work, failed reconstructions, and excess documentation. These records do not establish clinical efficacy or population-wide benefit. They do, however, make the proposed design problem concrete: can a system learn what restores useful access to this person’s thinking, preserve that understanding across interruptions, and measure success by what the person is able to do? We outline practical design principles, failures to guard against, and testable research questions.