Memory for Focebook Posts beats faces and books
Facebook.com |
People's
memory for Facebook posts is strikingly stronger than their memory for human
faces or sentences from books, according to a new study. The findings shed
light on how our memories favour natural, spontaneous writing over polished,
edited content, and could have wider implications for the worlds of education,
communications and advertising.
The
research, authored by academics at the University of Warwick (Dr Laura Mickes)
and UC San Diego (including Professors Christine Harris and Nicholas
Christenfeld), tested memory for text taken from anonymised Facebook updates,
stripped of images and removed from the context of Facebook, and compared it to
memory for sentences picked at random from books and also to human faces.
The
researchers found that in the first memory test, participants' memory for
Facebook posts was about one and a half times their memory for sentences from
books.
In a
second memory test, participants' memory for Facebook posts was almost two and
a half times as strong as for faces.
Lead
author Dr Laura Mickes of the Department of Psychology at the University of
Warwick said: "We were really surprised when we saw just how much stronger
memory for Facebook posts was compared to other types of stimuli.
"These
kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between
amnesiacs and people with healthy memory."
A
further set of experiments delved into the reasons behind this. It seems that,
as one might expect, Facebook updates are easier to memorise as they are
usually stand-alone bits of information that tend to be gossipy in nature.
However,
the study suggests that another, more general phenomenon, is also at play. That
is, our minds may better take in, store, and bring forth information gained
from online posts because they are in what the researchers call 'mind-ready'
formats -- i.e., they are spontaneous, unedited and closer to natural speech.
These
features seem to give them a special memorability, with similar results being
found for Twitter posts as well as comments under online news articles.
Professor
Christine Harris suggests "Our findings might not seem so surprising when
one considers how important both memory and the social world have been for
survival over humans' ancestral history. We learn about rewards and threats
from others. So it makes sense that our minds would be tuned to be particularly
attentive to the activities and thoughts of people and to remember the
information conveyed by them."
Our
language capacity did not evolve to process carefully edited and polished text,
notes author Professor Nicholas Christenfeld. "One could view the past
five thousand years of painstaking, careful writing as the anomaly. Modern
technologies allow written language to return more closely to the casual,
personal style of pre-literate communication. And this is the style that
resonates, and is remembered."
Dr
Mickes said: "Facebook is updated roughly 30 million times an hour so it's
easy to dismiss it as full of mundane, trivial bits of information that we will
instantly forget as soon as we read them.
"But
our study turns that view on its head, and by doing so gives us a really useful
glimpse into the kinds of information we're hardwired to remember.
"Writing
that is easy and quick to generate is also easy to remember -- the more casual
and unedited, the more 'mind-ready' it is.
"Knowing
this could help in the design of better educational tools as well as offering
useful insights for communications or advertising.
"Of
course we're not suggesting textbooks written entirely in tweets, nor should
editors be rendered useless, -- but textbook writers or lecturers using
PowerPoint could certainly benefit from using more natural speech to get
information across.
"And
outside these settings, at the very least maybe we should take more care about
what we post on Facebook as it seems those posts might just be remembered for a
long time."
The paper, Major Memory for Microblogs, is published in the
journalMemory &
Cognition.
Source: University of Warwick
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