Memory for Facebook posts better than that for books and people

**Recent research at the University of Warwick suggests that our memory for Facebook posts is stronger than our memory for sentences from published books, or for faces.**

New research carried out by professors at the University of California, San Diego, and Dr Laura Mickes from Warwick, suggests that Facebook has more of an impact on people’s memories than they may have thought.

The research suggests that memories favour the colloquial style of a Facebook status, which mimics our natural speech, to the sentences viewed in published books.

One of the experiments took 32 undergraduates and tested their memories for Facebook posts in comparison to their memory for sentences from books.

The Facebook posts were remembered one and a half times better than the sentences from books.

Also the expression of an emoticon used to emphasise one’s emotions may remain in people’s memories far longer than the capacity to remember another’s actual facial expressions.

The experiment on 16 participants showed that memory is at least two-and-a-half-times better for Facebook posts than for remembering faces.

It is believed that this may be because of our natural interest towards trivial gossip, and the stand-alone nature of the information which makes the posts easier to remember.

The findings may offer insight into improving education and advertising, as more natural speech could be used in order to better communicate information.

Dr Mickes concluded her analysis with a note of caution: “At the very least maybe we should take more care about what we post on Facebook as it seems those posts might be remembered for a while.”