Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a long, solitary program of memory experiments on himself between 1880 and 1885, memorizing lists of meaningless three-letter nonsense syllables (chosen to avoid any pre-existing meaning or association) and testing his own recall of them at increasing delays, then relearning each list to measure how much faster relearning went compared with the original learning.
Facts
Key FindingRecall of newly learned nonsense syllables dropped sharply within the first hours after learning and then declined much more slowly thereafter, a pattern now called the forgetting curve, and relearning a list took substantially less time than learning it originally had, showing some trace of forgotten material survives even after conscious recall fails. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Forgetting Curve
Wikimedia FoundationMethodology sectionQuote, Methodology section
Ebbinghaus studied the memorisation of nonsense syllables, such as "WID" and "ZOF" (CVCs or Consonant–Vowel–Consonant) by repeatedly testing himself after various time periods and recording the results.
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