Lateral Thinking and Its Relationship with Cognitive Offloading and Among postgraduate students

The current research aims to identify: 1- Lateral thinking among graduate students. 2- Cognitive Offloading among postgraduate students. 3- The correlation between lateral thinking and cognitive Offloading among postgraduate students. 4- The significance of differences in the correlation between lateral thinking and cognitive Offloading among postgraduate students according to the variables of Sex (male, female) and specialization (scientific, humanities). 5- The extent to which lateral thinking contributes to cognitive Offloading among postgraduate students. The current research is limited to postgraduate students at Wasit University of both Sex (male, female) and of the specialization (scientific, human) for the academic year (2025 - 2026). The final application sample consisted of (400) male and female students, who were selected using a stratified random method with proportional distribution. In order to achieve the research objectives, the researcher adopted the (Al-Dhahabi, 2024) test for lateral thinking, while he built the cognitive Offloading scale based on the theory of (Risko & Gilbert, 2016). The two research scales were presented to a group of expert arbitrators to judge the validity of their items, and then their psychometric properties were extracted during the application to the statistical analysis sample. After confirming the validity of the two scales, they were applied in their final form to the research sample. After completing the application, the researcher used appropriate statistical methods to analyze the data with the help of the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), and the research results showed the following: 1- postgraduate students do not engage in lateral thinking. 2- postgraduate students do engage in cognitive Offloading. 3- There is a weak positive correlation between lateral thinking and cognitive Offloading. 4- The results indicated that the differences in the correlation between lateral thinking and cognitive Offloading were not statistically significant based on Sex and specialization. 5- Cognitive Offloading can contribute to lateral thinking. According of these results, the researcher presented some conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions, as explained in Chapter Four.