Hermann Ebbinghaus Research Paper

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, Germany on January 24, 1850. Ebbinghaus' father was a rich merchant, and he encouraged Hermann to go to a University. At age 17, Ebbinghaus started his education at the University of Bonn studying history and philosophy, later he studied at the Universities of Berlin and Halle. He stopped his studies and served for the Prussian army in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. After the War he continued and finished his doctoral degree in Philosophy at the University of Bonn in 1873. For the next seven years following the war, he tutored and studied independently in Berlin, France, and England and became more interested in Psychology. “In pursuit of his ambition to apply the scientific method to the study of 'higher' cognitive processes, Ebbinghaus invented a new method for the study of memory.” (Tadeusz Zawidzki, 2005)
In the late 1870s, Ebbinghaus became interested in the workings of human memory. As a young doctor of philosophy, he was determined to study higher mental processes and examine these processes that were neglected by William Wundt. Ebbinghaus was his own subject that he tested on. “He wanted to develop a means of visualizing
This is what he calls the learning curve. He established that relearning is easier than learning something for the first time, and that it takes longer to forget material after each time you learn the same thing again. His work also suggested that learning is more effective when it is spaced out over time rather than crammed into a single marathon study session. Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first to discover the spacing effect. In psychology, the spacing effect refers to the fact that humans and animals more easily remember or learn items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time, rather than studied repeatedly in a short period