Never forget a Face(book): Memory for online posts beats faces and books

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 journal Memory & Cognition.