Twitter Trend: Retweeting Leads To Poor Content Comprehension, Recall?

Retweeting may hamper memory and cause learning problems. The findings are according to a new study that implied the need to think prior to deciding to click.

Constant retweeting or sharing of information can result in the brain's cognitive overload, which may later affect the learning and memory storage. The findings were based on the study conducted by researchers from the Beijing University and the Cornell University, although Facebook had some concerns regarding the decreasing original sharing, Medical Xpress reported.

Retweeting or posting previously shared information decreases the capacity of a person to create new ideas, which later renders to a poor performance, according to Qi Wang, Cornell University's Professor of Human Development. An experiment was done with college students from the Beijing University, with two groups given messages from Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Two choices were given to one group, which are read the next message or re-post the message, while the other group may just go on to read the following message.

The participants were then asked to finish the online test to determine if they can remember the content of the messages that they have previously shared or read. According to Wang, the result indicated that the group allowed to re-post the messages were shown to have poor content comprehension and recall. The study, which was published in Computers in Human Behavior on April 28, suggested that the poor performance of the participants who re-posted the messages was next to cognitive overload. As explained by Wang, the decision process of choosing to re-post or not tires out the cognitive resources, Zee News reported.

Retweeting results in cognitive overload, which hinders the subsequent task. According to Wang, students who surf online and exchange the information may perform very poorly when they go to take a test. Hence, the researchers suggest that web interface must have a model that encourages cognitive processing.