Hermann Ebbinghaus is a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. He is the first person to characterize the learning curve. He is also known for discovering the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve and the technique of repetition. His method became one of the most important experiments in early psychology.
Early life
Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a we althy merchant. He was brought up in the Lutheran faith and was a student of the city gymnasium. At the age of 17, he began attending the University of Bonn, where he planned to study history and philology. During his time there, he developed an interest in philosophy.
Professional career
After receiving his doctorate, Ebbinghaus moved to Europe. In England he taught at two small schools in the south of the country. He later moved to Germany, where he became a professor at the University of Berlin. In 1890, together with Arthur Koenig, he founded the journal Psychology and Physiology of Organs.feelings.
In 1894 he moved to Poland, where he worked on a commission that studied how the mental abilities of children declined during the school day. Thus was born the Ebbinghaus method for younger students. The groundwork for future intelligence testing has been laid.
Start research
In 1878, Ebbinghaus began to conduct formal experiments on himself. They laid the foundation for the psychological study of learning and memory. The professor was determined to show that higher mental processes could be studied through experiments that were in opposition to the popular thought of the time. The Ebbinghaus technique is the use of simple acoustic coding and service rehearsal, for which a wordlist could be used.
Meaningless syllables
Learning depends on prior knowledge. Therefore, the human mind needs something that can be easily remembered without relying on previous cognitive associations. Easily formed associations with regular words will interfere with the results. The Ebbinghaus technique is based on the use of elements that will later be called "nonsense syllables". These are combinations of the "consonant-vowel-consonant" type, where the consonants are not repeated and the syllable has no previous association. Ebbinghaus created his collection of such syllables in the amount of 2300. Under the usual sound of a metronome and with the same intonation of the voice, he read them out and tried to remember at the end of the procedure. One such study required 15,000recitations.
Restrictions on memory research
There are several limiting factors in the Ebbinghaus technique. The most important thing was that the professor was the only person studied. This limited the generalizability of the study to the population. Ebbinghaus's experiments stopped experiments in other, more complex areas of memory, such as semantic, procedural, and mnemonics.
Forgetting and learning curves
The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve describes the exponential loss of information that a person has learned. The sharpest decline occurs in the first twenty minutes. Decay is significant within the first hour. The curve flattens out in about a day.
The Ebbinghaus learning curve refers to how quickly a person learns information. The sharpest increase occurs after the first attempt, and then gradually levels off. This means that less and less new information is retained after each iteration.
Memory saver
Another important discovery is savings. It refers to the amount of information stored in the subconscious even after it cannot be consciously accessed. Ebbinghaus memorized the list of items until it was fully restored. After that, he did not gain access to the list until he completely lost memory of it. He then relearned the words and compared the new learning curve with the previous one. The second time, memorization was faster. The difference between the curves and is calledsavings.
School benefit
Ebbinghaus owns an innovation related to sentence completion training. Thus, he studied the abilities of schoolchildren. His exercises were borrowed by Alfred Binet and included in the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. Sentence completion is widely used in memory research. Also - in psychotherapy, as a tool to help use the motivation and motivation of the patient.
In the modern world, the test according to the Ebbinghaus method "Filling in the missing words in the text" is used. It is used to reveal the development of speech and the productivity of associations. The test subject gets acquainted with the text in which he can enter words. They must be selected so that a coherent story is obtained.
Working with memory
In his methodology, Ebbinghaus described the difference between involuntary and voluntary memory. The first occurs with seeming spontaneity and without any act of will. The second - consciously and with an effort of will. Prior to Ebbinghaus, most contributions to the study of memory were made by philosophers and focused on observational description and speculation. His impact on the study of memory was almost immediate. It was coupled with the growing development of mechanized instruments that aided in the recording and study of memory. Reaction to his activities at the time was mostly positive.
In his work from memory, Ebbinghaus divided his research into four sections: introduction, methods, resultsand discussion section. The clarity and organization of this format was so impressive to contemporaries that it has now become the standard in the discipline that all research reports follow.
Main works
Ebbinghaus' technique has become revolutionary in experimental psychology. His famous monograph Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1895) led to many discoveries that are still accepted as valid and of central importance. The book became a model for research practice in the new discipline. Rigorous application of the Ebbinghaus technique, trials, statistics, and results are all standard practices in traditional psychology.
In 1902, Ebbinghaus published his next article en titled "Fundamentals of Psychology". It was an instant success that continued long after his death. His last published work, The Plan of Psychology (1908), was also of great interest to psychologists.
