Hermann Ebbinghaus was one of the great giants of early experimental psychology. This field traces many of its roots to the pioneering efforts of German scientists just like him working in the middle and late nineteenth century (Schacter, 2001).
Alongside psychologist H. Ebbinghaus, there are other important names such as Gustav Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology, who in 1879 founded the first laboratory of his field in Leipzig, Germany.
EBBINGHAUS’ TAKE ON MEMORY
H. Ebbinghaus applied the scientific method to the problem of memory, lurking in territory that had never been researched by other scientists, and his first systematic experimental excursion in higher-order thought was published in his Über das Gedächtnis in 1885.
In this book, he showed the way he applied the experimental method to mnemonic phenomena.
THE NONSENSE SYLLABLE
When reading about Ebbinghaus’s work, the first thing you will probably read about is concerning his experiments with nonsense syllables.
To simplify his experimental situation, attempting to develop material that lacked any meaning but that could be learnable and reportable, he invented the nonsense syllables (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson, 2015; Hergenhahn & Henley, 2013; Schacter, 2001), which have a CVC (or consonant vowel consonant) structure (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson, 2015; Schacter, 2001). Some examples of such syllables include zug, pij, and tev. According to Hergenhahn & Henley (2013), his pool of nonsense material was comprised of 2,300 nonsense syllables.
From his long pool of nonsense material, he would choose a list of around 12 syllables to be learned, although he varied the size of the group to study the rate of learning as a function of the amount of material to be learned (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2013).
In his experiments, he served as his subject (Baddeley, Eysenck & Anderson, 2015). He always held constant the room in which he learned, the time of day, and the rate of presentation, which was quick (a fraction of a second, Hergenhahn & Henley, 2013), so he could avoid any temptation to attempt to find meaning in the stimuli.
After going through a list in this way, he would pause for 15 seconds and go through the list again. He did this until he was able to recite every syllable without making a mistake, at which point mastery was said to have occurred (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2013).
When mastery occurred, he would wait for various intervals and relearn the list one more time, always noting the time it took him to do so, and express the time saved in relearning as a percentage of the original learning time (Schacter, 2001).
In this graph, which is like a scatterplot, we can see the independent variable (x), which is the length of retention interval (hours), and the dependent variable (y), which is savings (%).
Ebbinghaus took the number of exposures it took to relearn the material and subtracted that from the number of exposures it took to initially learn the material, and this difference was what he called savings (Hergenhahn & Henley, 2013). The savings effect refers to the fact that it takes fewer exposures to relearn a list than the time it took to learn it the first time.
After reaching mastery for the first time with a list of syllables, he would wait for a certain length of retention interval in hours and relearn it one more time. Depending on how long the length of retention interval was, he would take more or less time to relearn the list.
When the length of retention interval is short, savings are higher. When the length of retention interval is high, savings are lower. So it would take him less time to relearn a list if the length of the retention interval is short (an hour or less).
According to Baddeley, Eysenck, and Anderson, this method was developed by other scientists after Ebbinghaus’s work in the US from the 1930s to the 1960s. This method became known as verbal learning.
EBBINGHAUS’ CONCLUSIONS
Using this experimental method, H. Ebbinghaus drew a set of conclusions (Schacter, 2001). These are:
- His curve of forgetting (the figure from the section above), one of the first mathematical characterizations of a mnemonic phenomenon.
- His systematic exploration of the relationship between the number of repetitions employed in original learning and the amount of subsequent savings. Savings steadily increases with large numbers of repetitions.
- The number of repetitions required to master lists of increased length. He found that a negatively accelerated curve described the relationship between repetition and list length.
- In his question about whether massed repetition (when repetitions are presented in immediate succession) is better than distributed repetition (when they are distributed over time) or vice versa, he found that distributed repetition is better.
With any considerable number of repetitions, a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than massing them at a single time.
Ebbinghaus (1885/1964, quote from Hergenhahn & Henley, 2013).
Hergenhahn and Henley (2013) would add that:
- He discovered that by overlearning material (by continuing to expose himself to the material after he had attained mastery), the rate of forgetting was considerably reduced. So, overlearning improves storage.
- He also discovered that learning meaningless material takes ten times as many exposures to learn 80 random syllables as it did to learn 80 meaningful ones. So, meaningfulness improves encoding.
Most of Ebbinghaus’s interest was with the encoding and storage processes of human memory, and not with retrieval processes.
PERSONAL NOTE
Finally, I would like to finish this entry with the next quote:
If by any chance a way to a deeper penetration into this matter should present itself, surely, considering the significance of memory for all mental phenomena, it should be our wish to enter that path at once. For at the very worst we should prefer to see resignation arise from the failure of earnest investigation rather from persistent, helpless astonishment in the face of their difficulties.
Ebbinghaus (1885, quote from Schacter, 2001).
This should serve as an inspiration for anyone believing that we should resign to any problem that seems intractable by science right now. Back when experimental psychologists saw higher-order cognition as something that was not meant to be researched by their field, Ebbinghaus took the first step, showing how wrong they were.
REFERENCES
Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. & Anderson, M. (2015). Memory. 2nd edition
Hergenhahn, B. R. & Henley, T. (2013). An introduction to the history of psychology
Schacter, D. L. (2001). Forgotten ideas, neglected pioneers. Richard Semon and the story of memory
EXOGRAM 
Interesting, and puts the quote you shared in context. I had heard of Helmholtz and Wundt, but I’m not sure if I’d heard of Ebbinghaus before now. Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka in their tome, “The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul” (highly recommended), covers a lot of the historical work, but they didn’t mention Ebbinghaus. It’s pretty amazing what early researchers were able to figure out.
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Indeed! H. Ebbinghaus was one hell of a scientist. Even nowadays, the things he discovered play a relevant role in experimental memory research.
I remember the moment you recommended me Jabklonka’s book. I still have it in my reading list tho, there is just so much to read.
Have you read Jablonka’s book on evolution?
Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M. J. (2014). Evolution in four dimensions. Genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic variation in the history of life. Revised edition
It seems that it has recent developments in the frontiers of evolutionary biology, with research from people who seem to be taking a step against the traditional view of evolution, proposing an extended evolutionary synthesis.
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I hadn’t seen Jablonka’s earlier book. Interesting. From the description, it resonates with some of the stuff they speculate on “Evolution of the Sensitive Soul”. I probably recommended Ginsburg and Jablonka’s book to you because it takes a much more historical survey of the research than most books, and you seem to have a strong interest in the history of research. (Most books are much more oriented toward recent research.)
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Indeed! I do not know why but I feel like learning the history of science helps elucidate certain concepts and see how they have evolved to the present point. Although sometimes I just end up reading about the history of science without intentions, like this book on evolutionary biology that was suggested to me because it is a good introduction to the topic (Sapp, 1994), although I should have guessed it would contain lots of history by its title.
Sapp, J. (1994). Evolution by association. A history of symbiosis
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It’s certainly interesting how scientifically minded some of the founders of psychology were. That this field has remained so soft plays into my standard theme that it’s difficult for us to “objectively” study ourselves, unlike geology and so on that do not have such personal connections. In a sense things seemed better back then than they do today. I do think science will prevail in the end however, and so clean out much of the crap that holds these fields back. One thing to note about effective ideas, is that they all ultimately support each other. Anyway, thanks for your efforts Fred.
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Yeah! Some of the early psychologists were truly empirically laden, like Ebbinghaus and Müller, although they studied phenomena such as ‘memory’, and behaviorist psychologists did a great job separating the psychology of their time from philosophical speculation like Wundt’s dualist perspectives on the nature of the mind.
I feel like we are getting every day closer to more fruitful approaches in psychology based in experimentation, mainly from embodied psychologists and famous neuroscientists like Dehaene, LeDoux, Barsalou, and Damasio. This is just a normal step in the development of a protoscience towards a unified paradigm, just like in evolutionary biology there were many theories of hereditary mechanisms competing against each other until a unifying framework, comprised mainly of Mendel’s work and what proponents of the evolutionary synthesis developed, led to natural selection as the main paradigm in the field.
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