User:Pktakhil92/sandbox

THIS IS MY CONTRIBUTION/PART OF THE GROUP WIKIPEDIA PAGE, THE INFORMATION IS ALSO PLACED IN DOMINIC VIGNALI'S SANDBOX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3ADom+vignali19%2Fsandbox

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus was a famous German psychologist that revolutionized the study of memory through his theories and experiments. Hermann's research on memory required him to create new techniques for experimentally manipulating items to remember and new ways of measuring memory. Some of his famous works and theories include the forgetting curve and the spacing effect.

Early Life

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on January 24th 1850 in Barmen, Germany to Lutheran merchants. From early childhood, his parents encouraged him to pursue an academic career and education, which later in his life he was able to do. During his lifetime, he enrolled at the University of Bonn in hopes of studying about history and philosophy. His studies were put to a hiatus because of the Franco- Prussian War where is was enlisted in the Prussian army in 1870. After serving in the military, Ebbinghaus was able to return back to his studies and eventually finished his dissertation on the Philosophy of the Unconsciousness by Eduard von Hartmann. In 1873, Ebbinghaus received his doctorate in philosophy at the age of only 23.

Achievements on Memory

• The Spacing Effet
• The Forgetting Curve

The Spacing Effect

This effect was discovered by Ebbinghaus in the late 19th century while he was writing his famous book on memory, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The spacing effect, a theory from cognitive psychology, is the idea that animals and humans have a higher learning capacity when they study items over a spaced amount of time, as opposed to repeatedly during a short crammed period of time. In layman's terms, students or animals will learn and remember better if they study material over a period of time, instead of shoving all the information in at once. This effect can be described as a feature of our explicit memory, as opposed to our implicit memory.

Types of Memory

Explicit Memory

Information that we consciously work to remember, such as knowledge and memory of events, is known as our explicit memory (also known as declarative memory. When we learn something new or try to remember something as a result of studying for an exam, the information is stored in our explicit memory. There are two types of explicit memory which are categorized into semantic memory and episodic memory. This memory is used everyday and became the basis for the founding of Ebbinghaus's spacing effect. The effect is based off the best way to create retention of memory and knowledge, which is all stored in our explicit memory. Other tasks that require our explicit memory include the recollection of events, open-ended exams, or remembering someone's birthday.

Episodic Memory

Specific explicit memory for any event that has occurred, such as your 20th birthday or what happened in class yesterday

Semantic Memory

This is the classification of memory most closely related to Ebbinghaus's work and The Spacing effect. This the memory of all general knowledge, such as facts, names, formulas, and anything applied to subject material.

Implicit Memory

This memory deals with all the information we retain unconsciously, instead of learning it like explicit memory. This memory is classified by things we do not intentionally remember, which we can further classify into procedural memory. Examples of this memory include riding a bike or writing a paper because those are ideas that we can not consciously remember doing; it does not require any repetition or learning to strengthen the memory like semantic memory would

The Forgetting Curve

Forgetting Curve Graph

This a hypothesis and graphic created by Ebbinghaus detailing the decline of information and memory storage when there is no attempt to retain or learn it, hence the "forgetting" aspect. In correlation with the Spacing Effect, this theory outlines the strength of a human memory and how certain brain waves help craft better memory. The graph of the curve shows that individuals tend to forget half of new material learned as days go by unless the material is attended to or reviewed throughout the course of the week.

References

• "Implicit and Explicit Memory -- Kendra Cherry (2005)". Retrieved 2013-11-18.
• "Hermann Ebbinghaus -- Princeton University". Retrieved 2013-11-18.