"Whereas books and newspapers typically are combed over by fact-checkers and carefully rewritten by editors, Facebook posts tend to be free flowing and more closely resemble speech . . ."
"If memories are the product of evolution, then the ability to remember socially derived conversations may have provided an advantage that helped early humans survive , , ,"
I wonder how precisely the authors of this study think survival-challenged early humans could have been exposed to fact-checked, edited non-conversational content. In other words, over what other content does a facility for remembering social blather give the advantage to an early human?
"Urgh! Bobo no! Stop wasting your time studying those paleolithic toxicology monographs and listen to your friends' random babbling about which roots and berries make them vomit."
"The study involved three different experiments with a sample that largely included undergraduate females . . ."
I also wonder just how much we can learn about the strategies of survival-challenged early humans from the behaviors of twenty-first century undergraduate females.
Neural Networking: Online Social Content Easier to Recall Than Printed Info
Originally posted 27 Jan 2013 on Google+