The Ebbinghaus Tradition

The Ebbinghaus Tradition
Although personal observations and anecdotes about memory can be illuminating and entertaining, they often originate from a specific experience of a given individual.

It is therefore open to question to what degree they are
a) Objectively ‘real’
b) Can be generalized universally, to all individuals.

Systematic scientific research can offer unique insight into these issues. Some of the classic systematic research in memory and forgetting was conducted in the late 18th century by Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Ebbinghaus taught himself 169 separate lists of 13 nonsense syllables.

Each syllable comprised a ‘meaningless’ consonant-vowel-consonant trigram. Ebbinghaus relearned to 31 days. He was especially interested in the extend to which forgetting had occurred over this time period, using the ‘saving score’ (i.e. how much time it took him to relearn the list) as a measure of how much he had forgotten.

Ebbinghaus noted that the rate of forgetting was roughly exponential: that is, forgetting is rapid at first (soon after the material has been learned), but the rate at which information is forgotten gradually decreases.

So the rate of forgetting is logarithmic rather than linear. This observation has stood the test of time well, and has been shown to apply across of range of different materials and learning conditions.

Another interesting feature of memory noted by Ebbinghaus is that, having ‘lost’ information such as some of your French vocabulary, you can learn this information much faster than someone which has never learned French in the first place (i.e. the concept of ‘savings’).

This finding implies that there must be a residual trace of this ‘lost; information in your brain.

This point also attests to the important uissue regarding consius verus unconscious knowledge, we are obviously not conscious of this ‘lost; French vocabulary, but the research findings regarding this preserved information indicate that there must be some retention of the memory record at an unconscious level.

A closely related point is made by the eminent psychologists B. F Skinner when he writes that ‘Education is what survives when what had been learned has been forgotten.’ We might add’.....consciously forgotten but retained in some other residual form’.
The Ebbinghaus Tradition