Herman Ebbinghaus is a German psychologist who has become a pioneer in experimental memory research. This is the first person to describe the learning curve. He is also known for discovering the Ebbinghaus forget curve and the repetition technique. His method became one of the most important experiments of early psychology.
Early life
Herman Ebbinghaus was born in Barman, in the Rhine province of the Kingdom of Prussia, in the family of a wealthy 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 stay 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 the Sense Organs.
In 1894, he moved to Poland, where he worked on a commission that studied how children's mental abilities decreased during the school day. So the Ebbinghaus technique was born for younger students. The foundation was laid for future intelligence testing.
Start of 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 can 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 a service rehearsal for which a list of words could be applied.
Meaningless Syllables
Training depends on prior knowledge. Therefore, the human consciousness 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 methodology is based on the use of elements that will later be called "meaningless syllables." These are consonant-vowel-consonant combinations where 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 tone of voice, he read them out and tried to remember at the end of the procedure. One such study required 15,000 declarations.
Memory exploration limitations
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 generalization of the study to the population. The Ebbinghaus experiments stopped experiments on other, more complex memory issues, such as semantic, procedural, and mnemonics.
Oblivion and Learning Curves
The Abbinghaus forget curve describes the exponential loss of information that a person has learned. The sharpest decline occurs in the first twenty minutes. Decay is significant during the first hour. The curve aligns 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 leveled. This means that after each repetition, less and less new information is stored.
Memory saving
Another important discovery is savings. It refers to the amount of information stored in the subconscious even after it cannot be consciously available. Ebbinghaus remembered the list of items until he was completely restored. After that, he did not gain access to the list until he completely lost his memory. Then he retrained the words and compared the new learning curve with the previous one. The second time memorization was faster. The difference between the curves is called saving.
School benefits
Ebbinghaus owns the innovation associated with the completion of training offerings. Thus he studied the abilities of schoolchildren. Alfred Binet borrowed his exercises and included Binet-Simon in the intelligence scale. Completion sentences are widely used in memory research. Also - in psychotherapy, as a tool to help use the patient's motivation and motivation.
In the modern world, a test is used according to the Ebbinghaus methodology "Filling in Missing Words in a Text". It is used to reveal the development of speech and the productivity of associations. The subject is acquainted with the text in which he can enter words. They must be selected so that a coherent story is obtained.
Work with memory
In his methodology, Ebbinghaus described the difference between involuntary and voluntary memory. The first occurs with apparent spontaneity and without any volitional act. The second - consciously and with an effort of will. Prior to Ebbinghaus, most contributions to the study of memory were undertaken by philosophers and focused on observational description and speculation. His influence on memory research was almost immediate. It was paired with the growing development of mechanized instruments that helped in recording and studying memory. The reaction to his activities at one time was mostly positive.
In his memory work, Ebbinghaus divided his research into four sections: introduction, methods, results, and discussion section. The clarity and organization of this format was so impressive for contemporaries that it has now become the standard in the discipline followed by all research reports.
Main works
The Ebbinghaus technique has become revolutionary in experimental psychology. His famous monograph Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1895) made it possible to make many discoveries, which are still recognized as valid and have central significance. The book has become a model of research practice in a new discipline. Strict application of the Ebbinghaus methodology, samples, statistics and results - all this is standard practice in traditional psychology.
In 1902, Ebbinghaus published his next article, entitled "Fundamentals of Psychology." It was an instant success, which lasted long after his death. His last published work, The Plan of Psychology (1908), was also of great interest to psychologists.