“Remembering Ebbinghaus”, 1985-07 ():
Reviews the book, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology by Hermann Ebbinghaus (196460ya). The goal of Ebbinghaus was to attempt a “natural science” of remembering by applying its exact methods. Exactly how Ebbinghaus conceived his ideas and methods for studying memory is unclear, certainly he gives almost no inkling in his book.
Ebbinghaus has been subjected to criticism over the years, occasionally vociferous. Here I will touch on only a few lines. First, he employed only one subject—himself. Second, and a more common criticism today, is that the artificiality of Ebbinghaus’s experimental conditions guaranteed that nothing important or useful could be found from his research. His research and the tradition it spawned is alleged to lack external validity.
This year marks the centennial of Ebbinghaus’s (1885139ya/196460ya) great book Über das Gedächtnis, which records one of the most remarkable research achievements in the history of psychology.
To prepare myself for writing this retrospective review, I conducted a haphazard poll of my colleagues and some advanced graduate students in the halls of my department. The main findings of this unscientific study are (1) everyone who has (or is near) a PhD in psychology has heard of Ebbinghaus; (2) most know he studied memory and invented nonsense syllables for the purpose; and (3) a few could relate the basic ideas of his relearning and savings measures of memory and his famous forgetting curve. Finally, (4) no one, aside from a very few “psychonomes”, has ever read his marvelous book.
The knowledge of my respondents is accurate so far as it goes but depressingly incomplete. It is like summarizing B. F. Skinner’s contributions by saying that he measured responses of pigeons, gave them food, and taught them how to play ping-pong.
Several readings of Ebbinghaus’s book have convinced me that he was one of psychology’s foremost pioneers, ranking with (if not ahead of) others from his time who are remembered more favorably today.
In this review I will try to capture briefly his major contributions—his basic aims, methodological innovations, and most important findings—from a contemporary perspective, discuss some common criticisms of his work, and provide an evaluation.
…Chapters 2–4 of the book constitute what would today be called the Method section. In Ch2 Ebbinghaus lays out his general plan, in Ch3 he describes his specific procedures, and in Ch4 he evaluates the general utility of the results obtained. The achievements here are nothing short of astounding, for he brings forth a science of memory and associations where before had been only centuries of speculation. Ebbinghaus was a meticulous experimenter and provided detailed descriptions of his procedures and controls.
…Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of Ebbinghaus’s methods is his dependent measure, savings obtained in relearning a series. As Ebbinghaus noted, if one’s criterion of memory is reproduction (which is often the situation today), then only two main outcomes are possible—Either one can reproduce the series or one cannot. But suppose that a poem is learned by heart and that when the learner is tested after half a year, “no effort at recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness” (pg8). Can the memory for such an experience never be studied? Does any trace of the experience exist? The relearning/savings method permits an answer to this question, for the poem can be relearned and one can determine if the number of trials (or amount of time) to accomplish the relearning is smaller than in the original learning. Assuming savings is shown in relearning, its magnitude reflects the amount of information retained.
…The actual conduct of experimental sessions was fastidious, even by modern standards. Ebbinghaus describes in detail how he strove to keep testing conditions constant, worrying about such matters as intonation in reading the series, fatigue, avoidance of special strategies, and even the influence of circadian rhythms. (“Since the mental as well as the physical condition of man is subject to an evident periodicity of 24 hours, it was taken for granted that like experimental conditions are obtainable only at like times of day” [pg23].) Learning long lists of nonsense syllables every day and then relearning them later is described, charitably, as “a tiresome task” (pg25) that often had unpleasant side effects. He notes that in the course of one experiment (Ch6) on the effects of repetition on retention, he could not take repetition of a series beyond 64 presentations: “For with this number each test requires about 3⁄4 of an hour, and toward the end of this time exhaustion, headache, and other symptoms were often felt which would have complicated the conditions of test if the number of repetitions had been increased” (pg55).
The sheer magnitude of the task Ebbinghaus set himself was immense. The first series of experiments was conducted in 1879 and 1880; many of them were replicated and new experiments conducted in 1883 and 1884. For example, in the experiment on repetition mentioned above, he was required to learn and relearn 420 series of 16 syllables, with the number of repetitions of each series in original learning varying up to 64. The learning and relearning phases together required slightly over 15,000 recitations.
…In one series of experiments concerned with remote associations (Ch9), he so worried that such biases might exist that he replicated the experiment under conditions in which he could not possibly know in what condition he was being tested, thus creating a double-blind experiment in which the subject and the experimenter were the same person.
[“remote association”: ‘an association between one item in a list or series and another item that does not adjoin it. Hermann Ebbinghaus first reported that associations are formed not only between adjacent items but also between items further apart in a list or series.’]
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