Is Facebook More Memorable Than Faces?

The quick updates that most of us post on Facebook throughout the day are usually meant to share a funny story or let our friends know what we are up to. But be careful what you post. New research has found that it's those little passages that we read during our social networking sessions that tend to stick with us longer than nearly anything else we see or read.

The study, a combined effort by scientists at the University of California San Diego and the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, showed that Facebook statuses and posts are more memorable than other sentences or people's faces.1 Sadly, they were remembered one and a half times better than sentences in published books and two and a half times better than people's faces. Is that significant? According to the researchers, that difference is roughly equivalent to the gap between someone with normal memory function versus someone with amnesia.

The subjects were 280 undergraduate students at the University of California San Diego. The participants were subject to several kinds of memory testing, measuring not only their recall ability, but how certain they felt about their recall. The participants were split into two groups and shown either 100 sentences posted on Facebook or 100 sentences that appeared in books. All of the sentences in both categories were relatively short, with the longest running 25 words, and the Facebook statuses actually averaged a few words longer than the book sentences. >

More to read:-

• Facebook’s Effects on Self-Esteem


• Facebook Friends Cause Stress