Research on Ebbinghaus’s Learning Curve

Abstract

Memory function is a popular area in cognitive psychology research during recent years. In this paper, I analysis Ebbinghaus’ experiment and the result: learning curve. In his experiment, Ebbinghaus makes comparisons between the different sets of data that he had collected and tested the correlations between the different elements. Also, the researcher compared the time required for recalling nonsense syllables with the time required for recalling the stanzas of Bryson’s “Don Juan” and discovered that it required much more time and effort to memorize the nonsense syllables than poetic stanzas. The result shows that relearn things repetitively will help people to better memorize it. The study also suggests that the meanings of the content can contribute to people’s memorization of the content. For students, reviewing in-class content repetitively and understanding the meaning of learned information can be conductive to the memorization of the acquired knowledge.