A new study shows people remember Facebook posts more easily than people's faces and sentences from books.
Dr. Laura Mickes from the University of Warwick and professors Christine Harris and Nicholas Christenfeld from UC San Diego found people have better memory power when it comes to remembering Facebook posts than people's actual faces or texts from books. The study reinstated the belief that people are more prone to remember spontaneous and informal writings rather than calculated and edited sentences.
The study was conducted by testing the memory on Facebook updates from unknown people and image strips that were taken from contents on Facebook and compared them to a person's memory of people's faces and sentences from books.
It was found that when it came to comparing facebook statuses to sentences from books, people remembered Facebook statuses one and a half times better than sentences from books.
Similarly when image strips from contents on Facebook and people's faces were compared, it was found that people remembered the former two and a half times better than the latter.
"We were really surprised when we saw just how much stronger memory for Facebook posts was compared to other types of stimuli,"lead author of the study, Dr. Mickes said according to Science Daily. "These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between amnesiacs and people with healthy memory,"
Further experiments lead to the discovery of why such was the case. Reportedly, the "gossipy" nature of most Facebook updates, in bits or as a whole, makes them easier to remember. It was also found that another human tendency was a play in such situations. The human mind is better at remembering things that are closer to natural speech and as Facebook updates fit the description, they become easier to remember. Researchers call online content "mind ready" in nature.
The findings have been published in Memory & Cognition.
