Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered experimental research on memory and forgetting. He developed the nonsense-syllable method and described the forgetting curve.

Nonsense syllable: A pronounceable sequence of letters designed to lack familiar meaning, used in experiments on learning and memory. Ebbinghaus used such syllables to reduce the influence of prior knowledge.
University of Bonn: A public research university in Bonn, Germany, founded in 1818. Ebbinghaus studied philosophy there before beginning his research career.
Georg Elias Müller: A German experimental psychologist whose research included memory, learning, and visual perception. Müller developed rigorous memory experiments in the tradition Ebbinghaus helped establish.
Learning curve: A representation of how performance or proficiency changes with practice or experience. Ebbinghaus's repeated trials connected practice to measurable improvements in learning.
Serial learning: Learning items in a fixed order so that each item is recalled in its place within a sequence. His memorization trials tracked how repetition affected recall of ordered syllables.
Gustav Fechner: A German physicist and philosopher who founded psychophysics by studying quantitative relations between stimuli and sensation. Fechner's experimental methods influenced Ebbinghaus's approach to measuring mental processes.
Mary Whiton Calkins: An American psychologist whose paired-associate experiments advanced the experimental study of memory. Her memory research extended laboratory methods to associations between paired items.
Distributed practice: A learning strategy that separates study into sessions spaced over time. His findings helped establish the retention benefits of spreading repetitions across sessions.
Savings method: A measure of retained learning calculated from the reduction in time or repetitions needed to relearn material. Ebbinghaus measured memory by how much faster previously learned lists could be relearned.
Psychophysics: The study of quantitative relations between physical stimuli and psychological sensations or judgments. Ebbinghaus extended experimental measurement from sensation to memory.

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Serial position effectRelated: His nineteenth-century serial-learning studies documented position-related differences in remembering.