Herman Ebbinghaus Place in Psychological History
During the late 1800's a new science was emerging in Europe. Psychology's rootscan be traced back to Germany and a man by the name of William Wunt. FollowingWunt other psychologists began emerging in different fields. Of these pioneers HermanEbbinghaus was one, and his field of study was memory. He performed the firstexperiments in 1885 in Germany and the following is a background on the man and his Herman Ebbinghaus was born in 1850 in Germany and died there in 1909. Hereceived his formal education at the Universities of Bonn, Halle, and Berlin (Gale, 1996). Ebbinghaus received degrees in philosophy and history from these universities (Gale,1996). Ebbinghaus went on to teach at the Universities of Berlin, Poland, Breslaw andHalle (Gale, 1996). These experiences combined with later experiences with memorycombine to give Ebbinghaus a curiosity about memory greater than most of his time. Memory can be defined as your amount of learning or your stored information. The process of storing and retreving information from the brain that is central to learningand thinking (Microsoft Encarta, [MSE], 1997). According to Myers (1998) memory is"any indication that learning has pers
DespiteWunt's disagreement many still use Ebbinghaus' work on memory as a model forresearch on human memory (Gale, 1996). Ebbinghaus tested himself up to thirty days after the inital remembering andgraphed what he remembered then (Myers, 1998). He divided the material into lists that he memorized indifferent conditions (Gale, 1996). Bibliography Ebbinghaus 6RefrencesBeer, Colin G. This was the Ebbinghaus 5first successful test of mental ability (Gale, 1996). He compared the time it took him to memorize any list once with the ammount of time ittook him to memorize the same list again (Gale, 1996). Ebbinghaus discovered that the longer he repeated the list on the first day the more heremembered on the second day when he was trying to recall the information (Myers,1998). He used the same mathematicaltreatment that Gustav Fechner used in Elements of Psychophysics to try and test memoryexperimentally (Gale, 1996). Ebbinghaus also developed a test for memoryin 1894 while studying the mental capacities of children he developed a sentencecompletion test that is still used today to measure intelligence (Gale, 1996). He recorded the average time it took him to memorize the listsperfectly then altared the test (Gale 1996). In the journal of Physiological Psychology William Wunt said that a teston memory could not be performed (Gale, 1996). He crated 2,300 onesyllable consonant-vowel-consonant combinations to make his study easier (Gale, 1996). After reading this Ebbinghaus decidedthat he would try and test memory himself.
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