Ebbinghaus, Muller and Memory Quiz

Herman Ebbinghaus

• Studied classical languages, history, and philosophy, and received a doctorate from Bonn University.
• Inspired by Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics, which led him to conduct research on memory and psychology.
• Became a lecturer on philosophy at the University of Berlin and published "On Memory: an Investigation in Experimental Psychology", a groundbreaking work that marked a turning point in psychology.
• Established psychology's second experimental journal: Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs.
• Published an article on the testing of school children's intelligence, introducing the sentence completion task later used in the Binet-Simon scale of intelligence.
• His student, William Stern, is credited with developing the concept of IQ.
• Many modern topics in psychology can be traced back to Ebbinghaus' work.

Ebbinghaus' Research on Memory

• Created 2,300 nonsense syllables to study learning as it occurred, and recorded the number of exposures needed to relearn the material.
• Developed the concept of "Savings", the difference between the number of times it took to initially learn the material and the number of times it took to relearn it.
• Created psychology's first retention curve, showing that forgetting is most rapid in the first few hours after learning, and that overlearning reduces the rate of forgetting.
• Found that meaningfulness affects memory, making it harder to learn meaningless material.
• Showed that spaced repetition is more effective than a single, long exposure to material.

George Elias Muller

• Also studied memory and found that people spontaneously organize materials to be remembered into meaningful patterns.
• Researched retroactive inhibition, the phenomenon where new learning can cause the forgetting of old material.
• Preferred physiological explanations over philosophical theories.
• Taught many women and one of the first African American's to teach psychology in the US, Gilbert Haven Jones.

Muller's Contributions

• Became a leading researcher in psychophysics after Fechner's death.
• Supported Hering's views on color vision over those of Helmholtz.
• Created novel instruments, such as the memory drum.

Hans Vaihinger and the Philosophy of "As If"

• Published a book on the philosophy of "As If", which posits that all we can be certain of are sensations and the relationships among them.
• Argued that social living requires us to give meaning to these sensations, and that we invent terms, concepts, and theories and act "as if" they were true.
• Believed that inventing meaning is a part of human nature.
• Suggested that fiction is not a derogatory term, and that ideas can be useful even if they are not true.
• Proposed similarities between his philosophy and pragmatism, evaluating ideas based on their usefulness.