Describe Ebbinghaus’s research on learning and memory. How was it influenced by the work of Fechner?
Ebbinghuas was the first one to actually include experimentation on psychological topics. He wanted to study the difficulty in learning, by measuring the times he failed to memorize. Fechner also measured sensations by measuring stimulus intensity, which was necessary to produce noticeable difference. Ebbinghuas was influenced by Fechner, and incorporated his style of experimentation to his own.
Ebbinghuas began his research by learning similar but not identical syllables. He later invented nonsense syllables. He found that materials having associations or connections could be learned easily. However, the unfamiliar syllables which were few to occur and had no associations were words with two consonants with a vowel in between.
He carried out various methods in his research. One was to check the retention power of human learning. It involved the speed of memorizing list of syllables versus the speed by which material could be memorized. He memorized the poem Don Juan. Each stanza had 80 syllables, and then he learned 80 meaningless or unassociated materials. He found out it was nine times harder learning the unassociated material.
He also found out that longer the material, longer would be the time required to learn. He also studied the effect of overlearnings, reviewing materials, and associations within lists.
He also invented the famous forgetting curve. This curve shows that material, when learned has more chances of being forgotten in the first few hours as compared to learning afterwards.