Beware! Retweeting or Resharing on Social Media Can Interfere With Learning, Hamper Memory

You might want to think twice before clicking that retweet button. Researchers at Cornell University and Beijing University investigated the cognitive effects of retweeting or resharing information on social media sites and found that it could interfere with people's learning abilities.

Dividing two groups of students in the experiment, each team was given a series of posts from Weibo, counterpart of Twiter in China. The first group was asked to "retweet" the posts while the others were asked to just ignore and proceed to the next post. Following the first task, both groups were given an online test on the content of those message.

Results of the study show that those who retweeted generated twice as many wrong answers and often demonstrated poor comprehension.

"What they did remember they often remembered poorly. For things that they reposted, they remembered especially worse," Qi Wang, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University said.

The researchers attributed the result to a phenomenon called "cognitive overload," wherein they were overwhelmed by the decision whether or not to share the message, instead of actually remembering what was written on the post.

Cognitive overload occurs when processing demands evoked by a learning task exceed the processing capacity of the cognitive system, a published article in the website of Stanford University reports.

To identify what might be the other effects "cognitive overload" might have, a succeeding experiment was done.

According to Eurekalert, the students were given an unrelated paper test on their comprehension of a New Scientist article, after viewing a series of Weibo messages.

Disturbingly, this diminished level of comprehension was also found in the separate, off-line reading.
Wang concluded that sharing leads to cognitive overload, and that interferes with the subsequent task. Moreover, she also said that the cognitive impairment also applies in the real world, citing example like those who surf online before taking an exam will most likely perform worse.

The researchers recoomend that online designs should be simple and redesigned to help people comprehend the content rather than confuse them in a web of decisions.