Hermann Ebbinghaus
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was a pioneer of memory research. He did not mind studying himself as the solo subject. He did not mind deriving far reaching generalizations that stood the test of a century. He is the first person on record to plot an approximation of a forgetting curve. He is also widely credited with the discovery of the spacing effect that was later reformulated in Jost's Law, which can be considered one of the stepping stones to deriving the two component model of memory.
Wikipedia of April 2018 notes that although he tried to account for his personal influences, there is an inherent bias when someone serves as researcher as well as participant. This is a valid claim. However, I hurry to add that the same might have been said of my own experiment that lead to spaced repetition. It is nice to have big data and double-blind experiments. However, even an insignificant piece of information can serve to build a breakthrough model. In that Ebbinghaus inspired countless followers and his contribution is immeasurable. Solo self-experimentation is here to stay.
See also:
- Ebbinghaus @Wikipedia
- Error of Ebbinghaus forgetting curve
- Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) and spaced repetition (1985)
- Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885)
- History of the optimization of repetition spacing
This glossary entry is used to explain "History of spaced repetition" by Piotr Wozniak (June 2018)
(power_regression).jpg)
Figure: Forgetting curve adapted from Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885). The curve has been rendered from original tabular data published by Ebbinghaus (Piotr Wozniak, 2017)
Figure: In the early 1990s, we inadvertently initiated a myth that Hermann Ebbinghaus invented spaced repetition. Amazingly, the myth seems to be gaining in power, as if waiting for the emergence of the Semantic Web. The picture snapshot from Google was taken on Feb 7, 2020, my late mom's 99th birthday
Figure: Google search for "forgetting curve" (November 2017). The "serrated set" of forgetting curves dominates the search. Many of the pictures are labelled by wrong attribution with the name of Hermann Ebbinghaus. The origins of the picture are presented in Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) and spaced repetition (1985) and Two components of memory