Hermann Vonn Ebbinghaus

Hermann Vonn Ebbinghaus

Hermann Vonn Ebbinghaus was a German experimental psychologist. He was born the son of Lutheran merchants in Barman, Germany on January 24, 1850. At the age of 17 he began studying philosophy and history at the University of Bonn from 1867 to 1870. He later received his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1873 after returning from his duty with the Prussian army.

Ebbinghaus began travelling the continent both lecturing and studying. During his travels he stumbled upon a copy of Psychophysics by Gustav Theodor Fechner. This sparked an interest in "higher mental processes" and the problem that Wilhelm Wundt failed to solve experimentally. Wundt was the first to establish a laboratory for psychological experimentation. This left Ebbinghaus to study the error Wundt made regarding these higher mental processes. He began doing so using himself as the subject of the experiments. This would eventually result in his well known work translated as On Memory in 1885.

Ebbinghaus invented what is known as the relearning task in which information is learned, set aside for a period of time, then relearned with the same criterion for accuracy. He measured the retention of memory and compared it to the original learning session. He coined the term "savings score" which is the amount of information that is retained (in terms of trials) or learned in comparison to the original learning task. In more simple terms the savings score would be represented as the amount of information saved in memory so that it did not need to be relearned. An example would be as follows: if it took 6 trials to originally learn some particular information, but only 3 trials after the relearning task, then 3 of 6 trials had been successfully encoded. This would represent a savings score of 50 percent.

Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables to demonstrate this experiment. Nonsense syllables are three letter combinations usually consisting of a consonant-vowel-consonant combination. These combinations which included some 2300, were not word and therefore did not make sense, hence the term "nonsense." He used these so-called nonsense syllables in order to discourage how the prior existence of the meanings may influence learning of the present. He used nonsense syllables in order to prevent complications in the experiment and its results.