Hermann Ebbinghaus

7 Key excerpts on "Hermann Ebbinghaus"

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  Perspectives on Memory Research

  Essays in Honor of Uppsala University's 500th Anniversary

  • Lars-Goran Nilsson, L.-G. Nilsson, T. Archer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  I INTRODUCTION

  Passage contains an image

  1	Functions of Memory

      Lars-Göran Nilsson University of Uppsala, Sweden    

  VIEWS ON PAST AND PRESENT

  Ebbinghaus is usually considered the founder of memory research. This is somewhat misleading, for, despite the title of his now classic book Über das Gedächtnis (1885), his research was about learning and repetition rather than memory. Although learning and repetition are important aspects of memorization, they represent merely a small part of it.

  The verbal learning approach initiated by Ebbinghaus was adopted by the behaviorists and became central to their thinking during the next three-quarters of a century. These students of verbal learning were more interested in studying how different tasks affect performance than in inferring what was going on in the minds of their subjects. Taking into consideration this reluctance to postulate any mental mechanisms intervening between stimulus and response and the complete dominance of behaviorism on the intellectual climate of the time, it is not surprising that memory research as understood today was dormant during this period.

  Although there was essentially no memory research at this time, memory did mean something more than a simple acquisition of stimulus-response connections to some scholars. One such person was Freud (1915), who wrote about motivational aspects of memory along lines quite different from those of the behaviorists. According to Freud, memories repressed to an unconscious level could be brought to consciousness by psychoanalytic therapy. Thus, for Freud it was convenient to conceptualize the mind in terms of storage and retrieval of information available in an unconscious state. More “modern” ideas of memory had been put forward even earlier than this. James (1890), for instance, when discussing consciousness, distinguished between primary and secondary memory; and Bergson (1896) distinguished between bodily and mental memory. According to these views, it was possible through mental effort to retrieve information about past experience currently not in consciousness. Other “modern” views of memory appearing in the literature somewhat later included schools of thought that emphasized the productive nature of memory. This should of course be contrasted with the reproductive character so prevalent in the verbal learning tradition. Such a productive nature of memory was emphasized by the Gestalt psychologists. Katona (1940), for instance, demonstrated this productive nature of memory in several ingenious experiments that emphasized organization and understanding instead of the reproductive character of memory commonly shown in rote learning experiments of the time. Although the productive character of memory was demonstrated very nicely by Katona and other Gestalt psychologists, the most prominent among the early scientists who supported this viewpoint was Bartlett (1932). His use of schema as a central concept has influenced later memory research considerably, although it did not have much of an impact on other students of memory during the first half of this century.

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  Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology

  Volume III

  • Gregory A. Kimble, Michael Wertheimer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  On Memory , was first published in 1885. It was an immediate sensation, and Professor Ebbinghaus was lauded by the great names of his time, including William James and E. B. Titchener among many others. I do not now discuss the contents of the book because we have present today the spirit of Professor Ebbinghaus to present his work and comment on these contributions in the light of later developments. By way of introduction, however, I will provide a brief biographical sketch of Professor Ebbinghaus and then I will turn over the podium to the spirit of our guest of honor. I will return at the end to make a few summary statements and provide a more objective assessment of the contributions of our guest than his modesty will permit.

  Biographical Sketch

  Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in 1850 in Barmen, Germany, near Düsseldorf, the son of a merchant. He mentions his early life in a short autobiographical statement contained in his doctoral dissertation of 1873. There he notes that his early education was in the local area and that later he attended the universities of Bonn, Halle, and Berlin, studying history and philology. In 1871, he switched to philosophy and received his doctorate at Bonn in 1873 on the basis of a dissertation entitled “On Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious.” We note here that he has come to see this early concern with unconscious thought processes as instrumental in developing his later thinking. After receiving his doctorate, he spent several years studying in England, France, and Germany and then supported himself in Berlin for some time by giving lectures at the university.

  Ebbinghaus conducted the first of a series of experiments on memory, that he will describe today, in 1878–1879; he presented this research to the University of Berlin in 1880 as his “habilitation thesis,” one of the credentials required at German universities to qualify a person to serve as a paid lecturer. He stayed in Berlin until 1893. While there, in 1883–1884, he conducted another series of memory experiments, which, combined with his earlier work, formed the basis for the 1885 book he discusses today. In 1893, he was passed over for promotion and then left Berlin to become full professor at the University of Breslau. Subsequently, he wrote a very successful textbook in psychology, developed a successful test for assessing intelligence in children in 1897, and conducted a variety of laboratory experiments in psychophysics.

  In 1905, Ebbinghaus left Breslau for the University of Halle, where he died in 1909. Earlier, in 1890, he had turned down an offer to become professor of psychology at Cornell—the position that E. B. Titchener later accepted—for personal reasons (Bringmann & Bringmann, 1986). The history of psychology in America could have been much changed had Ebbinghaus’ decision been different. Those in psychology who do not know Ebbinghaus’ work, which must be a small minority, will at least recognize the aphorism that opens his text Psychology: An Elementary Textbook

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  Archives of Memory

  A Soldier Recalls World War II

  • Alice M. Hoffman, Howard S. Hoffman(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  1A Psychological Overview of Memory

  Psychologists have been investigating memory for at least 100 years. It has usually been defined as the capacity or faculty of retaining and retrieving impressions from the past by means of recalling them or by recognizing them when some aspect of the impression is presented. This definition is generally accepted. A debate arises when we ask how the process works. Where and how are the impressions stored? Which impressions are stored—all of them or just some, and if just some, how are they selected for storage? What strategies are used for retrieval from memory, and what factors may impinge upon retrieval? Are these impressions susceptible to change and/or decay over time? The investigation of such issues has resulted in debate and the creation of opposing camps of theorists.

  In fact, two of the earliest pioneers in the study of memory, Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) and F.C. Bartlett (1932), took different approaches to the task of attempting to understand memory processes which have not as yet been brought into one organic conception. It is possible when studying most of the contemporary scientific literature on memory to assign a study either to the Ebbinghaus or to the Bartlett tradition.1

  It was primarily German professors who began to study the processes of the mind experimentally. Their own training was in areas where the laboratory method was well established, such as physics or physiology. Hermann Ebbinghaus, who had been so trained, observed that the experiments being conducted by most of his colleagues were restricted to the analysis of sense perception. He wanted to go a step further and use laboratory methods to look at “the workings of the mind and to submit to an experimental and quantifiable treatment the manifestation of memory.”2

  He recognized the inherent difficulties in the task he had set himself. “How,” he asked, “can we keep constant the bewildering mass of causal conditions which, insofar as they are of mental nature, almost completely elude our control, and which, moreover, are subject to endless and incessant change?”3

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  The Psychology of Human Memory

  • Arthur Wingfield, Dennis L. Byrnes(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  22 Chapter Two Long-Term Memory and the Ebbinghaus Tradition L earning is a cumulative process in which future acquisitions are based on knowledge and skills acquired in the past. Learning to read and write builds on our prior mastery of language as a communicative medium, just as learning algebra presumes some knowl-edge of arithmetic. In this sense we rarely learn anything completely new. But how does the acquisition of one piece of information affect our retention of another? One goal of an adequate theory of memory must be to specify how memories interact. There are three logically distinct stages in the learning process when memory interaction might occur: (1) during initial acquisition of the information, (2) during storage and retention of the information over time, and (3) during retrieval when the information is reactivated to produce some appropriate response. Over the years, numerous investigators developed a series of standard tasks and a sophisticated methodology to disentangle the various com-ponents of the memory process in an attempt to understand this interac-tion. The subject of remembering and forgetting is so vast that one can only hope to touch on the landmarks of this very large literature. The beginnings of this literature can be traced to the development of the associationist tradition of British philosophy and its adaptation into the first systematic studies of memory. These studies were conducted by the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909). The group of philosophers usually classified as associationists (e.g., Locke, Berkeley, Hume, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill) differed considerably among themselves both in some particulars and in many of their basic assumptions. We can, however, attempt to broadly sketch those major aspects of their views which had important collective influence on the later study of learning and memory. First, the majority of these philosophers argued for a theory of knowledge called empiricism.

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  Intelligence Science

  • Zhongzhi Shi(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • World Scientific

    (Publisher)

  In Ebbinghaus’ research, even after 31 days, there is still a certain intensity of saving; the information is still kept in some degree. Ebbinghaus’ original work initiated two important discoveries. One is to describe forgetting process as the forgetting curve. The psychologist replaced the pointless syllable with various materials such as word, sentence even story later on, finally found that, no matter what material to be remembered was, and the developing trend of the forgetting curve was the same as Ebbinghaus’ results. Ebbinghaus’ second important discovery was how long the information in long time memory can be kept. Research found that, information can be kept in long-term memory for decades. Therefore, thing learned in childhood, which has even been not used for many years, once have an opportunity to be learned again, will resume original level very shortly. If things had not been used any longer, which might be considered to be totally forgetting, but in fact it is not totally thorough to forget definitely. Amnesia and retention are the two respects of memory contradiction. Amnesia is that memory content can not be retained or difficult to be retrieved. Take things once remembered for example, they can not be recognized and recalled in certain circumstance, or mistakes happen while things being recognized and recalled. In various situations of amnesia: incomplete amnesia is the moment that you can recognize things but can not retrieve them; complete amnesia is that you can not recognize things and can not retrieve them. Temporarily can not recognize things or recollect them called temporary amnesia, otherwise called perdurable amnesia. Memory 381 Fig. 10.1 Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve (From Ebbinghaus, 1913) The reason why amnesia happens, there are many kinds of viewpoints, they are summing up as follows: 1.

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  An Historical Introduction To Modern Psychology

  • Gardner Murphy, Murphy, Gardner(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  learning was disregarded.

  The " memory span " experiment was a direct development of Ebbinghaus's study of the influence of varying the length of a series. In 1887, Jacobs2 published a further investigation of the memory span with a number of subjects, the first intensive study of the problem. The method was adopted by Cattell and others, and has been in wide use ever since.

  2 " Experiments on 'Prehension,'" Mind, XII.

  Ebbinghaus's next problem was the influence of repeated reading after the attainment of the capacity for perfect repetition, i.e., the influence of " overlearning." He wished to know what happened when, after he had learned a series completely, he continued to study it. This involved his conception of memory as a matter of degree; he sought to measure the strength of the connections established between obseryed items. Instead of relying upon the distinction between learned and unlearned material, he introduced the celebrated " saving method," which undertakes to measure how much labour is necessary to bring back what has once been known. Suppose we learn two lists of forty-eight syllables each, and then allow twenty-four hours to pass. We may find that from the first we can recall two-thirds of the syllables, but that it takes twenty repetitions to regain the whole list; from the second list we recall the same number of items, but it takes thirty repetitions to complete the series. Ebbinghaus realized the possibility, in fact, the probability, that he could get a better test of retention by measuring the amount of work needed to relearn

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  Topics in the History of Psychology

  Volume I

  • G. A. Kimble, K. Schlesinger(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  While investigations of modality effects remained popular for years, it was recognized that the results were inherently difficult to interpret. The experimenter could control the sense avenue through which the materials were presented, but the subject remained free to translate the input into other modalities. This objection was given especial force by the widespread assumption that individuals fell into distinct memory types (or ideational types) reflecting preferences for different modalities. A basic distinction was made among visual, auditory, and tactual-motor types, but many individuals were assumed to have “mixed” dispositions. Given such individual variations, differences between conditions of stimulation in any one experiment would be heavily dependent on the distribution of memory types in the sample of subjects.

  Forgetting Curves

  Following Ebbinghaus’ lead, investigators continued to plot curves of forgetting, seeking to determine the basic shape of the function. For sensory stimuli (“simple materials”), a negatively accelerated declining curve was typically obtained, similar to Wolfe’s for pitch. Thus, the temporal trends appeared to be similar for “simple” and “complex” materials.

  A striking feature of Ebbinghaus’ own curve was the extremely rapid rate of forgetting. Subsequent investigators who used Ebbinghaus’ methods observed heavy but less severe losses (e.g., Radossawljewitsch, 1907; Finkenbinder, 1913). The more recent findings were considered more plausible. “What an unreliable instrument memory would be if it forgot as rapidly as Ebbinghaus believes!” (Meumann, 1913, p. 332). It now seems very likely, of course, that none of the subjects tested later was victimized by the cumulative effects of interference as much as was Ebbinghaus.

  The general shape of the forgetting curve appeared to be largely independent of both the type of material and the method of testing. Measuring recognition for lists of common English words over retention intervals ranging from 1 minute to 7 days, Strong (1913) obtained a function that strikingly resembled Ebbinghaus’. Most of the empirical curves could be adequately fitted by a logarithmic equation (cf. Woodworth, 1938, p. 55).

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