Hermann Ebbinghaus (January 24, 1850 — February 26, 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve.[1] He was the father of the eminent Neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.
| Hermann Ebbinghaus | |
|---|---|
Hermann Ebbinghaus
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| Born | January 24, 1850 Barmen, Germany |
| Died | February 26, 1909 (age 60) Halle, Germany |
| Citizenship | German |
| Fields | psychology |
| Institutions |
University of Berlin, University of Breslau University of Halle |
| Known for | research on memory |
| Influences | Gustav Fechner |
| Influenced | Charlotte Buhler |
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Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, Germany, the son of a wealthy Lutheran merchant. At the age of 17, he began attending the University of Bonn, where he had planned to study history and philosophy. During the next three years, he moved around, spending time at Halle and Berlin as well. In 1870, his studies were interrupted when he served with the Prussian Army in the Franco-Prussian War. Following this stint in the military, Ebbinghaus finished his dissertation on Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosphie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious), and received his doctorate in 1873, when he was 23 years old.
After acquiring his PhD, Ebbinghaus moved to Berlin, where he spent several years before leaving to travel in France and England for the next three years. In England, he may have taught in two small schools in the South of the country (Gorfein, 1885). In London, in a used bookstore, he came across Gustav Fechner's book Elements of Psychophysics, which arguably spurred him to conduct his famous memory experiments. He began his work in 1879, but he may have performed his first set of experiments on several students from the English schools he had taught at. In 1885, the same year that he published his monumental work, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, he was accepted as a professor at the University of Berlin. In Berlin, he founded the Psychological journal Zeitschrift für Physiologie und Psychologie der Sinnesorgane (The Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs). He also founded two psychological laboratories in Germany.
In 1894, he was passed over for promotion to professor at Berlin, most likely due to his lack of publications. Instead, Carl Stumpf received the promotion. As a result of this, Ebbinghaus left to join the University of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). While in Breslau, he worked on a commission that studied how children's mental ability declined during the school day. While the specifics on how these mental abilities were measured have been lost, the successes achieved by the commission laid the groundwork for future intelligence testing.[2]
In 1902, Ebbinghaus published his next piece of writing entitled Die Grundzuge der Psychologie (Fundamentals of Psychology). It was an instant success and continued to be long after his death. His last published work, Abriss der Psychologie (Outline of Psychology) was published six years later, in 1908. This, too, continued to be a success, being re-released in eight different editions.[3] Shortly after this publication, in 1909, Ebbinghaus developed pnuemonia and died, at the young age of 59.
In his work on memory, Ebbinghaus was determined to show that higher mental processes are not hidden from view, but rather, could be studied using experimentation. To control for most potentially confounding variables, Ebbinghaus wanted to use simple acoustic encoding and maintenance rehearsal for which a list of words could have been used. The reasoning behind his use of the nonsense syllables was that learning would be affected by prior knowledge and people’s understanding of the words. Furthermore, the easily formable associations between regular words would interfere with his results. He thus had to look for something that could be easily memorized but without any previous cognitive associations attached. This method allowed for an inexhaustible amount of new combinations of quite homogeneous character.***citation*** For these purposes he used something that would later be called “nonsense syllables”. A nonsense syllable is a consonant-vowel-consonant combination, where the consonant does not repeat, and the syllable does not have any prior meaning. BOL (sounds like ‘Ball’) and DOT (already a word) would then not be allowed. However, syllables such as DAX, BOK, and YAT would all be acceptable. After creating the possible combinations and eliminating the meaning-laden syllables, Ebbinghaus ended up with 2,300 resultant syllables. Nevertheless, it was later determined that humans impose meaning even on nonsense syllables in order to make them more meaningful. This fact would make the nonsense syllable PED (which is the first three letters of the word ‘pedal’) less nonsense than a syllable such as KOJ; the syllables are said to differ in association value.[4] It appears that Ebbinghaus recognized this, and only referred to the strings of syllables as “nonsense” regarding the syllables as possibly having meaning. Once he had created his collection of syllables, he would pull out a number of random syllables from a box and then write them down in a notebook. Then, to the regular sound of a metronome, and with the same voice inflection, he would read out the syllables, and attempt to recall them at the end of the procedure. One investigation alone required 15,000 recitations.
It is important to note that there are several limitations to his work on memeory. The most important limitation was that Ebbinghaus was the only subject in his study; a fact which limited the study’s generalizability to the population. Although he attempted to regulate his daily routine to maintain more control over his results, his decision to avoid the use of participants sacrificed the external validity of the study in exchange for the soundness of the internal validity. Also, although he tried to account for his personal influences, the study was also heavily influenced by Ebbinghaus’ bias, seeing as he was both the research conductor as well as the participant.
In 1885, he published his groundbreaking Über das Gedächtnis ("On Memory", later translated to English as Memory. A Contribution to Experimental Psychology) in which he described experiments he conducted on himself to describe the processes of learning and forgetting.
Ebbinghaus made several findings that are still relevant and supported to this day. First, arguably his most famous finding, the forgetting curve. The forgetting curve describes the exponential curve that illustrates how fast we tend to forget the information we had learned. The sharpest decline is in the first twenty minutes, then in the first hour, and then the curve evens off after about one day.
The learning curve, which was described by Ebbinghaus, refers to how fast we learn information. The sharpest increase occurs after the first try, and gradually evens out, meaning that less and less new information is retained after each repetition. Like the forgetting curve, the learning curve is also exponential.
Ebbinghaus had also documented the serial position effect, which describes how the position of an item in the list affects the likelihood of said item being recalled. The two main concepts in the serial position curve are the recency and primacy effects. The recency effect refers to the fact that we remember the most recent information better because it is still stored in short-term memory. The primacy effect is remembering the first items in a list better due to increased rehearsal and commitment to long-term memory.
The other important discovery is that of savings. Savings refers to the amount of information retained in the subconscious even after this information had been completely forgotten (cannot be consciously accessed). To test this, Ebbinghaus would memorize a list of items until perfect recall and then would not access the list until he could no longer recall any of its items. He then would relearn the list, and compare the new learning curve to the learning curve of his previous memorization of the list. The second list was generally memorized faster, and this difference between the two learning curves is what Ebbinghaus called “savings”.
Ebbinghaus also described the difference between involuntary and voluntary memory, the former occurring “with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will” and the latter being brought “into consciousness by an exertion of the will”.
The bulk of the work on memory prior to Ebbinghaus’s contributions centered primarily on observational description and speculation, with most of this work undertaken by philosophers. For example, Immanuel Kant used pure description to discuss recognition and its components and Sir Francis Bacon claimed that the simple observation of the rote recollection of a previously learned list was “no use to the art” of memory. This dichotomy between descriptive and experimental study of memory would resonate later in Ebbinghaus’s life, particularly in his public argument with former colleague, Wilhelm Dilthey.
Ebbinghaus’s effect on memory research had been almost immediate. With very few works published on memory in the previous two millennia, Ebbinghaus’s work on memory spurred memory research in the United States in the 1890s, with 32 papers published in 1894 alone. This research was also coupled with the growing development of mechanized mnemometers – various devices that aided in the recording and studying of memory, which illustrates the progress that was launched from Ebbinghaus’s work.
The reaction to his work in his day was mostly positive. Noted psychologist William James called the studies “heroic” and said that they were “the single most brilliant investigation in the history of psychology”. Edward B. Titchener also mentioned that the studies were the greatest undertaking in the topic of memory since Aristotle.
Although Ebbinghaus is generally considered the one who popularized experiments in psychology it is important to note that he was not the first one to conduct experiments in psychology. Johann Andreas Segner, more than a century before, had invented the “Segner-wheel” to see the length of after-images by seeing how fast a wheel with a hot coal attached had to move for the red ember circle from the coal to appear complete. (see iconic memory)
Ebbinghaus can also be credited with pioneering sentence completion exercises, which he developed in studying the abilities of schoolchildren. It were these same exercises that Alfred Binet had borrowed and incorporated into the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. Sentence completion had since then also been used extensively in memory research, especially in tapping into measures of implicit memory, and also has been used in psychotherapy as a tool to help tap into the motivations and drives of the patient. He had also influenced Charlotte Buhler, who along with Lev Vygotsky and others went on to study language meaning and society.
Ebbinghaus is also credited with discovering an optical illusion now known after its discoverer—the Ebbinghaus illusion, which is an illusion of relative size perception. In the best-known version of this illusion, two circles of identical size are placed near to each other and one is surrounded by large circles while the other is surrounded by small circles; the first central circle then appears smaller than the second central circle. This illusion is now used extensively in research in cognitive psychology, to find out more about the various perception pathways in our brain.
Ebbinghaus is also largely credited with drafting the first standard research report. In his paper on memory, Ebbinghaus arranged his research into four sections: the introduction, the methods, the results, and a discussion section. This clarity and organization of this format was so impressive to contemporaries that it has now become standard in the discipline and all research reports follow the same standards laid out by Ebbinghaus.
Unlike notable contemporaries like Titchener and James, Ebbinghaus did not promote any specific school of psychology nor was he known for extensive lifetime research, having only done three works. He had never attempted to bestow upon himself the title of the pioneer of experimental psychology, did not seek to have any “disciples”, and left the exploitation of the new field to others.
In addition to pioneering experimental psychology, Ebbinghaus was also a strong defender of this direction of the new science, as is illustrated by his public dispute with University of Berlin colleague, Wilhelm Dilthey. Shortly after Ebbinghaus left Berlin in 1893, Dilthey published a paper extolling the virtues of descriptive psychology, and condemning experimental psychology as boring, claiming that the mind was too complex, and that introspection was the desired method of studying the mind. The debate at the time had been primarily whether psychology should aim to explain or understand the mind and whether it belonged to the natural or human sciences. Many had seen Dilthey’s work as an outright attack on experimental psychology, Ebbinghaus included, and he responded to Dilthey with a personal letter and also a long scathing public article. Amongst his counterarguments against Dilthey he mentioned that it is inevitable for psychology to do hypothetical work and that the kind of psychology that Dilthey was attacking was the one that existed before Ebbinghaus’s “experimental revolution”. Charlotte Buhler echoed his words some forty years later, stating that people like Ebbinghaus "buried the old psychology in the 1890’s". Ebbinghaus explained his scathing review by saying that he could not believe that Dilthey was advocating the status quo of structuralists like Wilhelm Wundt and Titchener and attempting to stifle psychology’s progress.
Some contemporary texts still describe Ebbinghaus as a philosopher rather than a psychologist and he had also spent his life as a professor of philosophy. However, Ebbinghaus himself would probably describe himself as a psychologist considering that he fought to have psychology viewed as a separate discipline from philosophy.
There has been some speculation as to what influenced Ebbinghaus in his undertakings. None of his professors seem to have influenced him, nor are there suggestions that his colleagues affected him. Von Hartmann’s work, on which Ebbinghaus based his doctorate, did suggest that higher mental processes were hidden from view, which may have spurred Ebbinghaus to attempt to prove otherwise. The one influence that has always been cited as having inspired Ebbinghaus was Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics, a book which he purchased second-hand in England. It is said that the meticulous mathematical procedures impressed Ebbinghaus so much that he wanted to do for psychology what Fechner had done for psychophysics. This inspiration is also evident in that Ebbinghaus dedicated his second work Principles of Psychology to Fechner, signing it “I owe everything to you”[5]
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