| German psychologist who pioneered in the development
of experimental methods for the measurement of rote learning
and memory.
Ebbinghaus received his Ph.D. degree from the University
of Bonn in 1873. Shortly thereafter he became assistant
professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin, a
post he held until 1894, when he was appointed professor
at the University of Breslau.
Using himself as a subject for observation, Ebbinghaus
devised 2,300 three-letter nonsense syllables for measuring
the formation of mental associations. This learning invention,
together with the stringent control factors that he developed
and his meticulous treatment of data, brought him to the
conclusion that memory is orderly. His findings, which included
the well-known “forgetting curve” that relates
forgetting to the passage of time, were reported in Über
das Gedächtnis (1885; Memory).
After completing his work on memory, Ebbinghaus turned
to research on colour vision and in 1890, with the physicist
Arthur König, founded the periodical Zeitschrift für
Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (“Journal
of the Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs”).
In conjunction with a study of the mental capacities of
Breslau schoolchildren (1897), he created a word-completion
test. That same year the first part of another work on which
his reputation rests, Grundzüge der Psychologie (1902;
“Principles of Psychology”), was published. In
1905 he left Breslau for the University of Halle, where
he wrote a still more popular work, Abriss der Psychologie
(1908; “Summary of Psychology”). Ebbinghaus' research
showed that, contrary to prevailing beliefs, scientific
methods could be applied to the study of the higher thought
processes.
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