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Retweeting or sharing an information with friends on social media makes it difficult to remember the same information, new study claims. According to a study conducted by researchers from Cornell University in the US, retweeting or sharing information on social media may have a negative impact on the person's memory as it creates a "cognitive overload" that interferes with learning and retaining.

"Most people do not post original ideas anymore. You just share what you read with your friends," said Qi Wang from Cornell University, reported Daily Mail. "But they do not realise that sharing has a downside. It may interfere with other things we do," warned Wang.

For the purpose of the study, the research team conducted experiments on a bunch of students to show that "retweeting" interfered with learning and memory, both online and offline. During the experiment, which was conducted on computers in a laboratory setting, the students were divided into two groups. Both the groups were presented with a series of messages from Weibo, which is Twitter's Chinese equivalent.

While the first group was offered the option either to share a message or turn to the next message, the other group only had the next option. The students were then made to sit for an online test on the content of the messages. It was found that participants of the group who had the option to share the messages gave double the wrong answers as compared to the other group and also demonstrated poor comprehension.

"For things that they reposted, they remembered especially worse," Professor Wang added, reported Science Daily. The research team found that the participants who reposted messages experienced cognitive overload. "When there is a choice to share or not share, the decision itself consumes cognitive resources," Wang explained.

In another experiment, the students were made to read some Weibo messages, with one group offered the same share option, and then read an unrelated article. Again, it was found that the reposting group performed poorly than the other group. The results showed that the repost group had a higher cognitive drain.

"The sharing leads to cognitive overload, and that interferes with the subsequent task," Wang said.  "In real life when students are surfing online and exchanging information and right after that they go to take a test, they may perform worse," she added. The research team suggested that web interfaces should not be designed to interfere with the reader's cognitive processing.

The study has been published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.