Georg Elias Müller

Georg Elias Müller (1850 to 1934) was a German experimental psychologist, credited with the theory of retroactive interference. Born in Grimma in Saxony, he studied at Leipzig, where Gustav Theodor Fechner introduced him to psychophysics, and completed his doctorate in 1873 at Göttingen under Hermann Lotze. From 1881 he ran there one of the first experimental psychology laboratories in the world. He worked on reaction time, psychophysics and colour theory, invented the memory drum for verbal learning research, and with his student Alfons Pilzecker introduced the term consolidation for the idea that new learning takes time to become permanent. He led the German Society of Experimental Psychology from its founding in 1903 until 1927.