PSY 112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 64: Hermann Ebbinghaus, Minivan

• School: Pace University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 112
• Professor: Siporin

Document Summary

Hermann ebbinghaus (1850 1909): pioneer of the study of memory, he was the only research participant, practiced memorizing lists of nonsense syllables, dif, laj, leq, muv, wyc, dal, sen, kep, nud. Not easy to do: plotted how many syllables he could remember against time that had elapsed since he had studied them, discovered an important principle of memory: Memory decays rapidly at first, but amount of decay levels off w/ time: ebbinghaus also discovered another important principle of learning. Spacing effect/distributed practice: improved learning when same amount of studying is spread out over periods of time, then when it occurs closer together, Massed practice: you will learn more if you study a little bit every day throughout the semester than if you wait to cram at the last minute. Overlearning: continuing to practice & study even when we think that we have mastered the material: ebbinghaus & other researchers found that overlearning helps w/ encoding info.