Original Research
The Impact of Social Media on the Short-Term Memory of Teenagers Katie Nelson¹, Pamela Miller, PhD.² ¹Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Baylor University, Waco, TX ²Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO
Abstract Social media sites such as Instagram have increased dramatically in popularity, especially with teenagers. However, there is still research to be done on how social media may influence important psychological growth or aspects of ordinary brain function, such as short-term memory. This experiment collected fifty voluntary participants and measured the impact that social media has on short-term memory in teenagers. Each volunteer was placed into a control (without social media) or experimental group (with social media). The participants were given two minutes to memorize as many words as possible from a 51-word list. Then, they sat in silence or used social media for five minutes. Finally, the participant has two minutes to write down as many words as they could recall. The hypothesis that social media would negatively influence the short-term memory in teenagers was proven correct. The teenagers from the control group recalled more words than those from the experimental group. A possible conclusion drawn from this experiment is that using social media will negatively influence short-term memory and impair recall, while learning or studying.
Introduction Social media platforms are used everywhere by practically everyone. Whether it is a mom waiting to pick up her child or a college student sitting in class, people are occupying themselves through social media. Every upcoming generation seeks for their attention to be captured all the time and social media is that medium. With more people using social media everyday, it is vital to research how this new media affects humans and more specifically their memory. Memory Professors Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin has established that memory is divided into three general stages: sensory, short-term and long-term. This idea was first proposed in 1968 and was the subject of both professors’ ongoing studies until 2016. They revealed a new understanding that short-term memory includes the concept of conscious working memory (Shiffrin, 1977). Absorbing most information is done without intention, unconsciously, and the working memory is used to pick up stimuli to remember. The memory process begins with sensory memory when immediate information is first recorded by senses. It quickly flows to the short-term (or working) memory, which is activated memory that holds information briefly. The working memory specifically is not just a temporary shelf for holding new information, but instead is an active “scratchpad” where the brain actively processes information by making sense of new inputs and connecting them to long-term memories. Long-term memory is a somewhat permanent and limitless storehouse for all information, including skills, knowledge, andexperiences (Myers & DeWall, 2018). Every human records information
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through this memory-process, but interference in any stage can change the way memories are recorded and stored. This threestep process is widely accepted and used to understand how humans document outside input. Short-term memory usually requires information to be continually repeated to be retrieved later. Typically, information is held for about 20-30 seconds and then begins to fade. Effortful processing is used to encode new information but requires conscious effort and attention (Loftus, 2018) to keep information in the brain and later stored as long-term memory. These two stages of memory work together to help process and save new information. A research experiment run by Alan D. Baddeley, British psychologist, and professor of psychology at the University of York explored how memory span is related to the length and occurrence of an English word. Participants in his experiment read aloud different words that had one of two lengths: one syllable and five syllables. He found that recall with the onesyllable length word set was more likely since the short-term memory has a limited life and the more information it is asked to hold, the less likely it will be remembered (Baddeley et al., 1975). It makes logical sense that Baddeley would find that words of shorter length were recalled more than longer ones. The ability to recall correlates with the length of the word in such a way that future experiments should use a variety of words to get a balanced experiment. Though different aspects of human memory have been studied throughout the years, one thing is clear. Memory can be easily changed, and no memory recalled is a correct permanent representation of the prior event. With this, it is important to
