"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," said researcher Laura Mickes, visiting scholar at University of California, San Diego.
"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," Mickes said.
For the study, Mickes and her colleagues set up a memory test in which participants were shown 200 sentences for three seconds each on a computer screen, LiveScience reported. Half of the lines were taken from anonymised Facebook updates.
For example, "The library is a place to study, not to talk on your phone" and "My math professor told me that I was one of his brightest students", and the other sentences were pulled from recently published books, such as, "My throat was burning from screaming so loudly" and "Underneath the mass of facial hair beamed a large smile".
All the selections were similar in length, and the Facebook posts were taken out of the context of the social media site --
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