Hermann Ebbinghaus

1850-1909 · German · Experimental Psychology of Memory

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

Hermann Ebbinghaus was the German psychologist who first brought exact experimental measurement to memory — and, in doing so, proved that the higher mental processes, which the founders of the new psychology had thought beyond the reach of experiment, could be studied with the rigor of a natural science. Working alone, on himself, with monkish patience, he invented a method and a material to make memory measurable: the *nonsense syllable*, a meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant unit stripped of association, and the *savings method*, which measured retention by the time saved in relearning a…

Topics Hermann Ebbinghaus addresses

• the nonsense syllable
• the savings method
• the forgetting curve
• over-learning
• the spacing effect
• distribution of practice
• the serial-position effect
• the learning curve
• the experimental study of memory
• the measurement of memory
• self-experimentation
• retention below recall
• the completion test
• psychology's long past and short history
• quantitative psychology
• the experimental study of the higher processes
• memory as lawful
• the frictionless-plane method
• relearning
• meaningful versus meaningless memory

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