How Facebook increases brain power for the elderly

11 years ago | Posted in: Technology | 512 Views

OLDER people seeking to maintain their brain power should consider logging on to Facebook, researchers are advising.

A study has found that pensioners, after learning to use the site, performed 25 per cent better in tasks designed to measure their ability to continuously monitor and to quickly add or delete the contents of their working memory.

Researcher Janelle Wohltmann, arranged Facebook training for 14 elderly people who had never used the site or had used it less than once a month. They were instructed to become Facebook friends only with those in their training group and were asked to post on the site at least once a day.

A second group of 14 non-Facebook-using pensioners was taught to use an online diary in which entries were kept private, with no social sharing component.

They were asked to make at least one entry a day, of no more than three to five sentences to emulate the shortness of messages that Facebook users typically post.

The study’s third group of 14 was merely told they were on a waiting list for Facebook training.

At the start and end of the eight-week study, participants, who ranged in age from 68 to 91, completed a series of questionnaires and neuropsychological tests measuring social variables, such as their levels of loneliness and social support, as well as their cognitive abilities.

Those who had learned to use Facebook performed around 25 per cent better than they did at the start of the study on tasks designed to measure their mental updating abilities.

Participants in the other groups saw no significant change in performance.

The American study was based on existing evidence about how learning new tasks can help older adults with overall cognitive function.

Miss Wohltmann, from the University of Arizona, suspects that the complex nature of the Facebook interface, compared to the online diary site, was largely responsible for the social networkers” improved performance.

She said: “When you create a diary entry, you save it and that’s all you see. But if you’re on Facebook, several people are posting new things.”

“You’re seeing this new information coming in, and you need to focus on the new information and get rid of the old information, or keep it in mind if you want to go back and reference it later, so you have to constantly update what’s there in your attention.”

ref: http://www.news.com.au

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