Hermann Ebbinghaus

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  Memory

  • Alan Baddeley, Michael W. Eysenck, Michael C. Anderson(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  So, what do we know about this miraculous process? In this chapter, we consider what science has taught us about how learning works. In addressing this topic, we first discuss broad factors that govern the rate and success of learning, irrespective of the type of learning one is engaged in. We follow this with a consideration of different types of learning, each with different characteristics and neural substrates. For example, how my son Max will learn how to tie his own shoes differs from how he learns words, or his preferences for his stuffed Penguin (aka Pengu) over his stuffed bear. Appreciating these many different flavors of learning will illustrate the tremendous complexity of the process that made you the person you are today.

  The contribution of Hermann Ebbinghaus

  Believe it or not, you are sitting in your seat right now, studying this text, in part because of a heavily bearded, 19th-century German philosopher named Hermann. As implausible as it may seem to you, this is actually true. To see why, consider the surprising fact that as recently as 150 years ago, some philosophers argued with conviction that the mind could not be scientifically studied. How could it be? To be studied with science, it must be governed by rules and causality, and it must be observable. None of these things seemed like it could possibly be true. So, when in the 1880s, a young German philosopher, Hermann Ebbinghaus, proposed an experimental study of memory, he was being rather bold. Ebbinghaus devoted two or three years to this pioneering enterprise before moving on to scientifically study other topics such as intelligence and color vision. However, in that brief period he laid the foundations of a new science of learning and memory, a science that is particularly relevant to rapidly changing societies like our own, in which people need to learn far more than did earlier generations; a science that helps us to understand how we make the miraculous transition from our Jolly Jumpers to the people we are today. This science yielded the current textbook, your class, and ultimately, your decision to study this book today.

  Ebbinghaus’s contribution to the science of memory was as simple as it was profound (see Chapter 1 for a picture!). Ebbinghaus decided that the only way to tackle the complex subject of human memory was to simplify the problem. He tested only one person—himself—and as he wished to study the learning of new information and to minimize any effects of previous knowledge, he invented some entirely new material to be learned. This material consisted of nonsense syllables: word-like consonant–vowel–consonant sequences, such as wux, caz, bij, and zol

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  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Michael Wertheimer, Gregory A. Kimble(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Ebbinghaus conducted the first of a series of experiments on memory, that he will describe today, in 1878–1879; he presented this research to the University of Berlin in 1880 as his “habilitation thesis,” one of the credentials required at German universities to qualify a person to serve as a paid lecturer. He stayed in Berlin until 1893. While there, in 1883–1884, he conducted another series of memory experiments, which, combined with his earlier work, formed the basis for the 1885 book he discusses today. In 1893, he was passed over for promotion and then left Berlin to become full professor at the University of Breslau. Subsequently, he wrote a very successful textbook in psychology, developed a successful test for assessing intelligence in children in 1897, and conducted a variety of laboratory experiments in psychophysics.

  In 1905, Ebbinghaus left Breslau for the University of Halle, where he died in 1909. Earlier, in 1890, he had turned down an offer to become professor of psychology at Cornell—the position that E. B. Titchener later accepted—for personal reasons (Bringmann & Bringmann, 1986). The history of psychology in America could have been much changed had Ebbinghaus’ decision been different. Those in psychology who do not know Ebbinghaus’ work, which must be a small minority, will at least recognize the aphorism that opens his text Psychology: An Elementary Textbook (1908, 1973): “Psychology has a long past, but a short history.” I bring you now one of the most important figures in that short history, Professor Hermann Ebbinghaus.

  Ebbinghaus: Invited Lecture

  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to be permitted to discuss my work before a group of such distinguished guests. It has been suggested that I limit my remarks to the development of the ideas that went into my book, On Memory, and to second thoughts I might have from the perspective of a hundred years or so. This provides a long time for such later thoughts and, in many respects, my first thoughts are the most interesting and the ones of which I am most proud. This is because the first thoughts were the most difficult ones—the ones that represented breaks with tradition and a striking out into the unknown. I am fortunate that, as was the case with Columbus, there was something there to be discovered.

  Important Figures in My Background

  I have had time, of course, to ruminate on the influences that led me to develop my ideas, and I have recognized that, like Newton, I had been standing on the shoulders of giants. Historians of psychology make much of the fact that I ran across a used copy of Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics

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  Perspectives on Learning and Memory

  • L.-G. Nilsson, T. Archer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  I INTRODUCTION

  Passage contains an image

  1	Functions of Memory

      Lars-Göran Nilsson University of Uppsala, Sweden    

  VIEWS ON PAST AND PRESENT

  Ebbinghaus is usually considered the founder of memory research. This is somewhat misleading, for, despite the title of his now classic book Über das Gedächtnis (1885), his research was about learning and repetition rather than memory. Although learning and repetition are important aspects of memorization, they represent merely a small part of it.

  The verbal learning approach initiated by Ebbinghaus was adopted by the behaviorists and became central to their thinking during the next three-quarters of a century. These students of verbal learning were more interested in studying how different tasks affect performance than in inferring what was going on in the minds of their subjects. Taking into consideration this reluctance to postulate any mental mechanisms intervening between stimulus and response and the complete dominance of behaviorism on the intellectual climate of the time, it is not surprising that memory research as understood today was dormant during this period.

  Although there was essentially no memory research at this time, memory did mean something more than a simple acquisition of stimulus-response connections to some scholars. One such person was Freud (1915), who wrote about motivational aspects of memory along lines quite different from those of the behaviorists. According to Freud, memories repressed to an unconscious level could be brought to consciousness by psychoanalytic therapy. Thus, for Freud it was convenient to conceptualize the mind in terms of storage and retrieval of information available in an unconscious state. More “modern” ideas of memory had been put forward even earlier than this. James (1890), for instance, when discussing consciousness, distinguished between primary and secondary memory; and Bergson (1896) distinguished between bodily and mental memory. According to these views, it was possible through mental effort to retrieve information about past experience currently not in consciousness. Other “modern” views of memory appearing in the literature somewhat later included schools of thought that emphasized the productive nature of memory. This should of course be contrasted with the reproductive character so prevalent in the verbal learning tradition. Such a productive nature of memory was emphasized by the Gestalt psychologists. Katona (1940), for instance, demonstrated this productive nature of memory in several ingenious experiments that emphasized organization and understanding instead of the reproductive character of memory commonly shown in rote learning experiments of the time. Although the productive character of memory was demonstrated very nicely by Katona and other Gestalt psychologists, the most prominent among the early scientists who supported this viewpoint was Bartlett (1932). His use of schema as a central concept has influenced later memory research considerably, although it did not have much of an impact on other students of memory during the first half of this century.

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  Essentials of Human Memory (Classic Edition)

  • Alan Baddeley(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Fig. 6.1 . Forgetting is rapid at first but gradually slows down; the rate of forgetting is more logarithmic than linear. As with Ebbinghaus's other work, this result has stood the test of time, and has been shown to apply across a very wide range of material and learning conditions. Another way of describing the relationship is in terms of Jost's Law, named after a nineteenth-century psychologist, which states that if two memory traces are equally strong at a given time, then the older of the two will be more durable and

  FIGURE 6.1 This is the dramatic curve that Ebbinghaus obtained when he plotted the results of one of his forgetting experiments. His finding, that information loss is very rapid at first and then levels off, holds good for many types of learned material. (Ebbinghaus, 1885)

  forgotten less rapidly. It is as if, in addition to decaying, memory traces become tougher as they age, resisting further decay.

  Memory for events

  Most studies of forgetting have, like Ebbinghaus's, concerned themselves with highly constrained sets of material such as lists of nonsense syllables or unrelated words, and have rarely investigated retention intervals of more than a month or so. What happens when more realistic material is recalled over longer intervals?

  Answering such a question presents a major problem. Consider my question about what you were doing 10 years ago. If you were to give me an answer, how would I know whether the information was correct? How would I go about checking? It is extremely unlikely that the necessary information is still available. One solution is to question respondents about events that were sufficiently noteworthy to attract the attention of virtually everyone at the time they happened. This strategy was followed by Warrington and Sanders (1971), who selected items that were headline news in Britain for each of a series of years extending from the previous year to more than 30 years before. They then tested their respondents’ memory for these events either by recall or recognition.

  The results obtained by Warrington and Sanders showed that substantial forgetting of public events does occur, but that contrary to popular belief younger people have a better memory than the elderly for both recent and distant events. Broadly similar conclusions were arrived at by Squire in the United States, using memory for the winners of classic US horse races or the names of TV programmes presented for only a single run. The forgetting curves we have discussed so far have been concerned mainly with memory for relatively poorly learned material. What of information that has been much more thoroughly and deliberately learned? Light was thrown on this by an intriguing study by Bahrick, Bahrick, and Wittlinger (1975), who traced 392 American high-school graduates and tested their memory for the names and portraits of classmates. Their study showed that the ability to recognise a face or a name from among a set of unfamiliar faces or names, and the ability to match up names with faces, remained at a remarkably high level for over 30 years. In contrast, the ability to recall

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