Preliminary research findings suggest that learning to use
Facebook may help give adults older than 65 a cognitive boost.
Janelle Wohltmann, a graduate student in the UA department
of psychology, set out to see whether teaching older adults to use the popular
social networking site could help improve their cognitive performance and make
them feel more socially connected.
Her preliminary findings, which she shared this month at the
International Neuropsychological Society Annual Meeting in Hawaii, show that
older adults, after learning to use Facebook, performed about 25 percent better
on tasks designed to measure their ability to continuously monitor and to
quickly add or delete the contents of their working memory – a function known
in the psychology world as "updating."