HERMANN EBBINGHAUS: BIOGRAPHY, MEMORY THEORY, CONTRIBUTIONS - PSYCHOLOGY - 2025

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was a German psychologist noted for his experimental work on the measurement of human memory and learning capacity. In addition to this, he published several of the most important works of psychology in history, and investigated in other fields such as the perception of color.

One of the aspects for which Hermann Ebbinghaus stood out was for being one of the first scientists to use the experimental method to study one of the considered "higher psychological processes." Until the arrival of this researcher, studies in this field were carried out mainly through introspection.

Müller, Marie

To study memory objectively, Ebbinghaus developed a series of meaningless text elements, the most famous of which were his "nonsense syllables." Later, using himself as an experimental subject, he verified the functioning of memory and the effect of elements such as repetition and time on it.

Thanks to his experiments, he developed concepts as important to the psychology of memory as the forgetting curve or the learning curve. He published his findings in works that gave him great prestige, including Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. In addition to this, he worked as a teacher in some of the most important centers of his time, such as the University of Berlin.

Biography

Early years

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on January 24, 1850, in a small German town known as Barmen near Bonn. There he spent the first years of his life, and in 1867, when he was 17 years old, he began attending classes at the local university. There is very little information about his childhood, other than that he studied at the local public school and was raised in the Lutheran faith.

At the University of Bonn, his plan was initially to study history and philology. However, during the years he spent in it he became increasingly interested in philosophy, and in the first studies on the functioning of the human mind that were being carried out at that time.

In 1870, Ebbinghaus had to interrupt his studies to serve in the army during the Franco-Prussian War. After this, he finished his work on the book Philosophy of the Unconscious by Eduard von Hartmann, and received his doctorate for it in 1873, when he was only 23 years old. After this event, he began to interact with the universities of Halle and Berlin, obtaining a position in the latter.

Career as a teacher and researcher

Having secured his post as a university professor in Berlin, Ebbinghaus set himself the goal of pursuing studies in psychology using empirical and quantitative methods, as was done in other natural sciences.

Until now, the few studies that existed in this discipline were based on introspection and the subjective experience of researchers.

Thus, while in Berlin, he founded a psychology laboratory at the university, as well as starting a publication called Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane.

Later, in 1894, he secured a post at the University of Breslau and founded another psychology laboratory there. Finally, in 1905 he moved to Halle, where he died four years later.

Jobs in the field of psychology

Because psychology was still a very young science at that time, Hermann Ebbinghaus had to carry out all his studies practically without guidance.

Despite being influenced by authors such as Fechner (who combined philosophical and scientific views) and Wundt, the founder of the first psychology laboratory in history, their approach was quite different from that of these two researchers.

His studies within the field of psychology were based mainly on the field of memory, which he managed to study objectively and empirically when no one had done it before.

In 1885 he published his first work, Memoria, in which he collected the results of all the studies he had carried out during the previous years and his conclusions on the subject.

However, many of his contemporaries did not see the value of this work, since at that time it was thought that psychology could never be studied from an experimental and objective point of view, and that trying to find causal relationships in the phenomena of the mind human was a waste of time.

Ebbinghaus therefore spent much of his later years disproving this idea and defending his position that fundamental psychological phenomena can be perfectly studied objectively. In addition, he also conducted studies on other related topics, such as perception (especially that related to colors).

For the rest of his life, he continued to publish papers and found psychology magazines and laboratories. At his death, however, his greatest contribution had been precisely to convince the scientific community that psychology could indeed be studied objectively.

Memory theory

Hermann Ebbinghaus's main obsession was to show that higher mental processes could be studied experimentally, and that causal relationships could be established within the realm of psychology, something that researchers of the time believed was impossible. To achieve this, he focused primarily on the field of memory.

Within this realm, Ebbinghaus developed a method based on elements known as "pseudowords" and "nonsense syllables." These are sets of letters that can be easily memorized but do not have a meaning, so any learning of them must necessarily be based on pure memory.

Its "nonsense syllables" were constructed following a consonant - vowel - consonant pattern, the first and last letter not being the same. Furthermore, the syllables he used could not have a previous meaning. So, for example, "CAL" would not be acceptable, but "BAK" could be used.

After removing all those nonsense syllables that had any previous meaning, he developed a list of approximately 2300 different ones.

Based on them, he developed his studies in the following way: after writing a list of them in a notebook, he tried to memorize them by reading them aloud to the rhythm of a metronome.

Conclusions and results

One of the first conclusions that Ebbinghaus reached was that the human mind attributes meanings to the elements that it wants to memorize even if they do not have them previously. He also found that some of the syllables were easier to memorize than others, depending on whether or not they could be associated with an already known word.

On the other hand, using this method he reached some important conclusions within the field of memory. For example, he created the concept of the "forgetting curve", which states that when memorizing a list of items, over time they will be gradually forgotten. Another of his most important ideas is the learning curve, in addition to his studies on the effect of repetition on memory.

Although Ebbinghaus's works were not particularly exhaustive on the functioning of memory, his main contribution was that it opened the doors to use the experimental method to investigate in this field.

Virtually all the research carried out in later decades on this matter was largely based on his.

Other contributions

In addition to his memorial work, Ebbinghaus was also famous for his research in other areas of psychology. For example, he created one of the first tests in history to measure the abilities of school-age children, which was later incorporated into the Binet-Simon intelligence test.

During his work in the field of perception, he made several important discoveries. For example, he found the so-called "Ebbinghaus illusion," which has to do with the perception of relative sizes.

Today, this is used to conduct research within cognitive psychology, to understand how the mental part of the sense of sight works. He also developed a theory about color vision.

In addition to this, Hermann Ebbinghaus also wrote what is considered the first standard research report. In his work Memoria, he followed a format that has become one of the most widely used in psychology: introduction, methods, results and discussion. This is precisely the structure that is used today to present studies in psychology.

However, Ebbinghaus published a very small number of works on psychology during his lifetime, and at no time did he promote a particular school of thought or seek disciples to continue his work.

Published works

Despite the importance Hermann Ebbinghaus had for the development of psychology as a science, he published very few works and carried out a relatively small number of studies. Some of his most important works are the following:

- Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology.

- Ebbinghaus, H. (1902). Fundamentals of psychology.

- Ebbinghaus, H. (1908). Psychology: An Elementary Textbook.

On the other hand, during his career he founded several psychology magazines, some of them of considerable importance at the time. The most important was Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, which was focused on research in the field of visual perception.

References

1. "Hermann Ebbinghaus" in: Britannica. Retrieved on: June 27, 2019 from Britannica: britannica.com.
2. "Hermann Ebbinghaus" in: Your Dictionary. Retrieved on: June 27, 2019 from Your Dictionary: biography.yourdictionary.com.
3. "Hermann Ebbinghaus" in: Famous Psychologists. Retrieved on: June 27, 2019 from Famous Psychologists: famouspsychologists.org.
4. "Hermann Ebbinghaus: biography of this German psychologist and philosopher" in: Psychology and Mind. Retrieved on: June 27, 2019 from Psychology and Mind: psicologiaymente.com.
5. "Hermann Ebbinghaus" in: Wikipedia. Retrieved on: June 27, 2019 from Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org.