New York, May 15 (IANS): Are you among those who love tweeting but somewhat wary of information via tweets from others? Join the 'Millennial Generation' that has a “healthy mistrust” of the information they read on Twitter.
“Nearly anyone can start a Twitter account and post 140 characters of information at a time, bogus or not, a fact participants seemed to grasp,” Kimberly Fenn, an assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University, was quoted as saying.
During the study, researchers showed 74 undergraduates in their 20s a series of images on a computer that depicted a story of a man robbing a car.
False information about the story was then presented in a scrolling text feed resembling Twitter feed.
The test was to see if students integrated the bogus information into their minds - called “false memory”.
The results showed that when the participants read the 'Twitter' feed, they were much less likely to form false memories about the story.
It suggests that young people are somewhat wary of information that comes from Twitter, Fenn added.
The researchers advise teenagers to take into account the medium of the message when integrating information into memory, said the study that appeared in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin.