Book
1885
Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Using himself as subject and nonsense syllables to strip out prior meaning, shows that forgetting follows a steep, regular curve rather than a haphazard one, and that relearning is faster than first learning.
Read itWhere it is now wrong
Every result here comes from one participant, Ebbinghaus himself, memorising nonsense syllables. The forgetting curve replicates well, but the deliberate stripping of meaning from the material is exactly what later work showed matters most to memory.
Before you start
FreeAdvancedlink checked 17 Sept 2026
Filed under Cognitive Psychology in Psychology.