Influential challenge to Wundt’s conception of experimental psychology came from Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909). Wundt had just published his Physiological Psychology, declaring that higher processes such as memory could not be studied experimentally. Ebbinghaus evidently took this as a challenge rather than a deterrent, and proceeded completely on his own to conduct one of the classic research programs in experimental psychology. Serving as his own subject, Ebbinghaus investigated the amount of time he needed to study material before being able to remember it perfectly. To counteract this familiarity effect, Ebbinghaus tried to find a large number of stimuli to be memorized that were equally unfamiliar at the outset. He created nonsense syllables by systematically going through the alphabet and constructing more than 2,000 consonant-vowel-consonant combinations—such as taz, bok, and lef—that could serve as originally neutral or meaningless stimuli to be memorized in his experiments. On average, he perfectly memorized a single sixteen-syllable list in just over twenty minutes. Having once memorized his lists, Ebbinghaus tested himself on retention under varying conditions.
When Ebbinghaus calculated his average savings for various periods of time between the original and the second memorizations, he was not surprised to find that savings decreased as the interval increased. More surprisingly and delightfully, however, the rate of decrease was not constant but fell on a regular forgetting curve, in which memory declined rapidly immediately after the initial learning but then almost leveled off. Ebbinghaus noted that the shape of this forgetting curve approximated a mathematical function similar to that in Fechner’s psychophysical law (except that Fechner’s curve increased at a progressively slower rate, while his own decreased). In sum, he demonstrated that memory could be studied experimentally and yield mathematically regular results.
Wundt could (and did) argue that nonsense syllables stripped of all meaningfulness could not stand in for normal mental stimuli and claimed that Ebbinghaus had only studied an artificial sort of memory. But even though Wundt had a point, it was largely overlooked by later generations of experimental psychologists who seized upon Ebbinghaus’s methods as a model for their research on human verbal learning.
Source: Fancher, R. E., & Rutherford, A. (2017). Pioneers of Psychology: A History (5th ed.). W.W. Norton And Company
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