hermann ebbinghaus was one of the first to chart the course of forgetting over time.
hermann ebbinghaus was one of the first to chart the course of forgetting over time.
who was one of the first to chart the course of forgetting over time?
hermann ebbinghaus
one of the first to study the mechanisms of forgetting was the german psychologist hermann ebbinghaus (1885). using himself as the sole subject in his experiment, he memorized lists of three letter nonsense syllable words—two consonants and one vowel in the middle. he then measured his own capacity to relearn a given list of words after a variety of given time period. he found that forgetting occurs in a systematic manner, beginning rapidly and then leveling off. although his methods were primitive, his basic premises have held true today and have been reaffirmed by more methodologically sound methods. the ebbinghaus "forgetting curve" is the name of his results which he plotted out and made 2 conclusions. the first being that much of what we forget is lost soon after it is originally learned. the second being that the amount of forgetting eventually levels off.
forgetting
failing to retrieve an event does not mean that this specific event has been forever forgotten. this could just mean the information was not encoded well. research has shown that there are a few health behaviors that to some extent can prevent forgetting from happening so often. one of the simplest ways to keep the brain healthy and prevent forgetting is to stay active and exercise. staying active is important because overall it keeps the body healthy. when the body is healthy the brain is healthy and less inflamed as well. older adults who were more active were found to have had less episodes of forgetting compared to those older adults who were less active. a healthy diet can also contribute to a healthier brain and aging process which in turn results in less frequent forgetting. reviewing information in ways that involve active retrieval seems to slow the rate of forgetting. paul connerton stated that there are seven types of forgetting, which are repressive erasure, prescriptive forgetting, formation of new identity, structural amnesia, annulment, planned obsolescence, and humiliated silence.
forgetting