Retweeting makes you forget what you read

If you want to remember an interesting post that you came across on the social media, try not to hit the retweet or share button as a recent study suggests so.

Research at Cornell University and Beijing University finds retweeting or otherwise sharing information creates a "cognitive overload" that interferes with learning and retaining what you've just seen. Worse yet, that overload can spill over and diminish performance in the real world.

Researcher Qi Wang said that most people don't post original ideas any more. You just share what you read with your friends, but they don't realize that sharing has a downside. It may interfere with other things we do.

Wang and colleagues in China conducted experiments with a group of Chinese college students as subjects to show that "retweeting" interfered with learning and memory, both online and off.

Noting that other research has shown people often pay more attention to elements of a web design such as "repost" or "like" than to the content, the researchers suggest that web interfaces should be designed to promote rather than interfere with cognitive processing. "Online design should be simple and task-relevant," Wang concluded.

The study is described in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.