Chatty updates on Facebook are much easier to remember than faces or carefully-worded sentences. A new study sheds 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 researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Memory and Cognition, tested memory for text taken from anonymous Facebook updates, stripped of images and removed from the context of Facebook, and compared it to memory for sentences picked at random.
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.
“We were really surprised when we saw just how much stronger memory for Facebook posts was compared to other types of stimuli,” says lead author Laura Mickes of the University of Warwick’s Psychology department. “These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between amnesiacs and people with healthy memory.”
Mind-ready format
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.
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—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
(www.futurity.org)
