Hermann Ebbinghaus

German psychologist who opened experimental memory science with nonsense syllables and the forgetting curve.

Specifications & Metrics

Über das Gedächtnis (1885) reported years of self-experimentation with nonsense syllables and relearning savings.
He demonstrated measurable, lawful forgetting and the spacing effect before anyone had studied memory in a lab.
His sentence-completion exercises, devised to test schoolchildren, were borrowed by Binet for the Binet-Simon intelligence scale.