Don't
forget this man's name!
Hermann
Ebbinghaus was a pioneer. Not someone who strode out into the
wilderness and built a log house, but a pioneer in the study of
memory. Ebbinghaus was very curious about the fact that even good
students forget 90% of what they learn in a classroom within 30 days,
and he tried to figure out what he could about when and why we
remember—and forget!
Ebbinghaus
worked with the memorization of “nonsense syllables,” 3-letter
syllables that didn't mean anything, such as YAT and KOJ. One thing
that made his research less useful to later researchers is that he
used only himself as test subject; it would be much better to use
many different people so that the findings could be generalized to
larger populations, and also it compromises research, to some extent,
to have the same person acting as both researcher and subject!
Still,
Ebbinghaus was able to describe findings that have stood up to later
testing, such as the sharp (exponential) “forgetting curve” and
“learning curve,” and the fact that we tend to remember the last
and first items in a list longer than the middle items. He also
studied “savings,” our ability to relearn things we had once
learned and then forgotten.
Train
your memory at Kids Memory Dot Com!
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| Ebbinghaus also invented this illusion, which is called the Ebbinghaus illusion! |
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