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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. Ebbinghaus was born to Lutheran merchants in Barmen, a German town near Bonn. At age 17, he entered the University of Bonn, where he was first drawn to the study of philosophy. His studies were interrupted in 1870 by the Franco-Prussian War, in which he served with the Prussian army. Prior to the War, he had also briefly attended the universities of Berlin and Halle, but then had returned to the University of Bonn, where he completed his dissertation on Eduard von Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. He received his doctorate in 1873 at the age of twenty-three. 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, 1985). 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 year 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. His very sparse contributions to academic writing eventually cost him the seat of head of philosophy department at the university of Berlin, which ended up going to Carl Stumpf. Nevertheless, he was described as an excellent teacher and eloquent speaker. Eventually, he had begun to drift away from his colleagues, and left to join the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1894. While in Breslau, he published a successful elementary textbook of psychology in 1908, and had also begun working on his next piece of writing Die Grundzuge der Psychologie (Fundamentals of Psychology). Before completing his third work, Ebbinghaus had died of pneumonia in 1909 at the age of 59. At a conference later that year, prominent American psychologist Edward B. Titchener called Ebbinghaus’s death a great loss to psychology. In his work on memory, Ebbinghaus was determined to show that higher mental processes are not hidden from view, but instead could be studied using experimentation. In order to simplify the procedure, Ebbinghaus wanted to use simple acoustic encoding and maintenance rehearsal for which a list of words could have been used. However, Ebbinghaus knew that prior knowledge affected learning, and people’s understanding of the words, and the easily formable associations between them would interfere with his results. He thus had to look for something that could be easily memorized but without any previous cognitive “baggage” attached. 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, but syllables like DAX, BOK and YAT would all be acceptable. After creating the possible combinations and eliminating the meaning-laden ones, Ebbinghaus wound up with 2,300 resultant syllables. Nevertheless, it has also been suggested that we may impose meaning on nonsense syllables to make them more meaningful, which would make nonsense syllable PED (which is the first three letters of the word ‘pedal’) less nonsense than a syllable like KOJ. 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 his 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. It is important to note that Ebbinghaus used himself as the only subject, attempting to regulate his daily routine in order to maintain more control over his results. He may have kept himself as the sole subject not out of convenience or ignorance but rather, because he did not want to subject anyone else to the tedious experiments. One investigation alone required 15,000 recitations.
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