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 advertising¹.

 

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 random²（随便地） 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 Psychology³ 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 stimuli⁴.

 

"These kinds of gaps in performance are on a scale similar to the differences between amnesiacs（健忘症患者） and people with healthy memory."

 

A further set of experiments delved⁵ into the reasons behind this. It seems that, as one might expect, Facebook updates are easier to memorise⁶ as they are usually stand-alone bits of information that tend to be gossipy（好闲谈的） in nature.

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