WASHINGTON, D.C.: In a digital world where information is at your fingertips, be prepared to hold on tight before it slips right through them. 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.
“Most people don’t post original ideas any more. You just share what you read with your friends,” said Qi Wang, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. “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 showing that “retweeting” interfered with learning and memory, both online and off.
The experiments were conducted at Beijing University, with a group of Chinese college students as subjects. At computers in a laboratory setting, two groups were presented with a series of messages from Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. After reading each message, members of one group had options either to repost or go on to the next message. The other group was given only the “next” option.
After finishing a series of messages, the students were given an online test on the content of those messages. Those in the repost group offered almost twice as many wrong answers and often demonstrated poor comprehension. What they did remember they often remembered poorly, Wang reported. “For things that they reposted, they remembered especially worse,” she added.
The researchers theorized that reposters were suffering from “cognitive overload.” When there is a choice to share or not share, the decision itself consumes cognitive resources, Wang explained…