Department of Psychology and Human Development, Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN, 37203, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2020 Apr 16;5(1):16. doi: 10.1186/s41235-020-00216-7.
Social media is an increasingly popular outlet for leisure and social interaction. On many social media platforms, the user experience involves commenting on or responding to user-generated content, such as images of cats, food, and people. In two experiments, we examined how the act of commenting on social media images impacts subsequent memory of those images, using Instagram posts as a test case. This project was inspired by recent findings of laboratory studies of conversation which found that describing a picture for a conversational partner boosts recognition memory for those images. Here we aimed to understand how this finding translates to the more ecologically valid realm of social media interactions. A second motivation for the study was the popularity of food- and dieting-related content on Instagram and prior findings that use of Instagram in particular is associated with disordered eating behaviors.
Across two experiments, we observed that commenting on Instagram posts consistently boosted subsequent recognition and that correct recognition increased with comment length. Stable individual differences in recognition memory were observed, and "unhealthy" food images such as chocolates were particularly well remembered; however, these memory findings did not relate to self-reported eating behavior.
Taken together, our findings show that the way in which we engage with social media content shapes subsequent memory of it, raising new questions about how our online lives persist in memory over time, potentially shaping future behavior.
社交媒体是一种越来越受欢迎的休闲和社交互动渠道。在许多社交媒体平台上，用户体验包括对用户生成的内容（如图像、食物和人物）进行评论或回应。在两项实验中，我们研究了评论社交媒体图像的行为如何影响对这些图像的后续记忆，以 Instagram 帖子作为测试案例。本项目的灵感来自于最近关于对话的实验室研究的发现，这些发现表明，为对话伙伴描述一张图片可以增强对这些图片的识别记忆。在这里，我们旨在了解这一发现如何转化为更具生态有效性的社交媒体互动领域。进行这项研究的另一个动机是 Instagram 上与食物和节食相关的内容的流行，以及之前的发现表明，Instagram 的使用与饮食失调行为有关。
在两项实验中，我们观察到评论 Instagram 帖子确实会持续增强后续的识别能力，并且评论长度与正确识别率成正比。我们还观察到稳定的个体识别记忆差异，巧克力等“不健康”的食物图像尤其容易被记住；然而，这些记忆发现与自我报告的饮食行为无关。
总之，我们的研究结果表明，我们与社交媒体内容互动的方式会影响我们对其的后续记忆，这就提出了一个新的问题，即我们的在线生活如何在记忆中持续存在并随着时间的推移潜在地塑造未来的行为。
