Hermann Ebbinghaus
German psychologist who began the experimental study of memory
German psychologist who studied memory by testing himself on lists of nonsense syllables, published in 1885, and described the forgetting curve, the measure of savings and the benefit of spreading practice.
Why this person matters
Ebbinghaus showed that memory could be studied with controlled experiments and numerical results, without relying on introspective description. His forgetting curve and savings measure remain standard teaching examples. William James praised the studies as heroic.
Main contributions
Nonsense syllables and self-testing
From 1879 he learned lists of nonsense syllables, ending with about 2,300, and measured how much he retained. Meaningless material is harder to learn than meaningful material. He was the only participant.
Forgetting curve and savings
He described the exponential loss of learned material over time and measured retention through 'savings', the faster relearning of a list. He also found that spreading repetitions over several days worked better than massing them on one day.
Work on schoolchildren
While at Breslau he worked on a commission studying how children's mental ability declined during the school day, and he developed sentence completion while studying schoolchildren's abilities.
Context and limits
The memory experiments had a single participant who was also the experimenter, which limits how far the numbers generalise and allows bias. Ebbinghaus himself wrote that the results might have wider validity only 'for my own personality'. They are best read as a demonstration of method rather than a set of population norms.
In your introductory course
Memory.Appears in the memory chapter alongside the forgetting curve and the spacing effect, and in the methods chapter as an early controlled study.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 8.3. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1879
Began his memory studies in Berlin.
- 1885
Published Über das Gedächtnis, translated in 1913 as Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.
- 1890
Co-founded the Zeitschrift für Physiologie und Psychologie der Sinnesorgane with Arthur König.
- 1902
Published Die Grundzüge der Psychologie.
Sources
- Classics in the History of Psychology (York University), Ebbinghaus, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, chapter 8Original work. Text passages inspected.
- New World Encyclopedia, Hermann EbbinghausReference work. Reference article inspected.
- Wikipedia, Hermann EbbinghausReference work. Reference article inspected.