In the parallel expansion of information abundance and generative artificial intelligence, human cognitive capacity has not been uniformly enhanced. While access to knowledge has become increasingly efficient, the processes through which understanding, judgment, and meaning formation occur are progressively compressed or bypassed. Interpretation is delivered more readily, yet opportunities for sustained cognitive engagement diminish. This condition reflects not a deficit of information, but a structural erosion of the cognitive pathways through which judgment is cultivated. This paper argues that museums face a corresponding transformation in institutional responsibility. Beyond preservation, exhibition, and public education, museums in the age of artificial intelligence must assume a Fourth Mission: sustaining cognitive reconstruction and the public training of judgment. This mission is not proposed as an additive extension of existing functions, nor as a historically successive stage, but as a normative reorientation responding to the limits of additive institutional logic under conditions of technological acceleration. To ground this argument, the paper reconstructs three historically dominant institutional orientations of museums—knowledge production, preservation and exhibition, and public education—and demonstrates how each relies on the accumulation of objects, information, or interpretation under the assumption that understanding will naturally emerge. In contemporary information environments, this assumption no longer holds. When interpretive outputs are already abundant and automated, further accumulation risks substituting for human judgment rather than cultivating it. In response, the paper introduces the Five-Tian Framework as a structured cognitive pathway that renders judgment formation explicit without prescribing interpretive outcomes. The framework models how understanding unfolds through successive stages of engagement, allowing institutions to support cognitive process rather than deliver conclusions. Artificial intelligence is subsequently repositioned from interpretive authority to cognitive infrastructure, capable of stabilizing interpretive pathways without collapsing them. By reframing museums as cognitive training institutions and redefining the role of artificial intelligence within them, this study positions museums as essential public institutions for sustaining judgment and meaning-making in the age of externalized intelligence.
Penglin Xu (Fri,) studied this question.