Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus

1. He was a German Psychologist.

   • The first psychologist to systematically study learning and memory.
     • He research launched a new field of enquiry, and helped establish psychology as a scientific discipline. His meticulous methods remain the basis of all psychological experimentation to this day.

2. He tested the effect association on memory, recording the results mathematically to see if memory follows verifiable patterns.

   • He found that there is typically a very rapid loss of recall in the first hour, followed by a slightly slower loss, so that after nine hours, about 60 percent is forgotten.
     • After 24 hours, about two-thirds of anything memorize is forgotten.
       • Ebbinghaus's findings:
         • Memory is gradual: there is a linear relationship between the number of repetitions in training on the first day and the amount of retained materials (practice makes perfect).
         • He noted that a list of 6 or 7 items can be decorated and maintained with a single presentation, while a longer list required repeated presentations.
         • Decorating again found that an old list requires less time and fewer attempts than the original memory.
         • The curve of forgetting: or forgetfulness has at least two phases: (a) a rapid initial decline, steeper in the first hour, followed by (b) a much more gradual decline that continues for approximately one month.
           • Plotted on a graph, this shows a distinct ''forgetting curve'' that starts with a sharp drop, followed by a shallow slope.

3. He's memory experiments showed that forgetting is most rapid within the first nine hours.

4. Methodology: decorate meaningless words, each consisting of two consonants separated by a vowel.

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