Question

Describe Ebbinghaus' research in your own words

Answer 1

Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1985 conducted a memory experiment on himself and came up with most famous Forgetting curve that describes the decrease in the ability of the brain to retain the learnt information over time.

Ebbinghaus created a list of 2300 non sense syllables using standard format of consonant-vowel-consonant (ZAX,BUK etc.)

He started memorising the list of the words that he grouped together by looking at each for just a fraction of seconds ,pausing for 15 seconds before going through the whole list again. He repeated the same until he was able to recall a series of words correctly at speed.

He experimented with different lengths, different learning speeds .And for each he noted the speed of learning and forgetting .

He found that more times the syllabi were repeated , the less time it took him to recall. He noted the rapid loss of recall in first hours after which the rate of forgetting slowed down .

Based on his findings, he created a forgetting curve that is exponential in nature,

Memory retention is 100% at the time of learning , 40% within first few days after which it decline of memory retention slows.

Based on his research he also found that meaningful patterns are recalled much quickly than meaningless patterns .