CLAS: Colby Liberal Arts Symposium

Impact of Source on Memory for Social Media and News Headlines

Parker-Reed, SSWAC

Past research has found that memory for gossipy content is better remembered than faces, and sentences in books. This research also concluded that entertainment headlines and comments were better remembered than breaking news headlines and comments. These were intriguing results that should be further explored. The purpose of this study is to further investigate whether memory for information contained in social media is driven by the content of the post or the format in which the post was presented. In addition this research will further explore source memory. Twitter posts and CNN headlines were presented to participants, some were altered so that content from Twitter posts was on CNN headlines, and CNN headlines was presented as a Twitter post. Participants completed a social media and news questionnaire and then took a memory test. The memory test was composed of new and old stimuli, and participants were asked if it was an old or new phrase and if it were old, they had answer whether it was a tweet or CNN headline. It was hypothesized that Tweets in a Twitter format would be remembered best, while CNN content in Twitter formats, and Tweets in CNN headlines would have lower recollection but still better memory than the CNN headlines in a CNN format.

https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2015/program/40