Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), German psychologist. Born in Barmen (now part of Wuppertal), and educated at the universities of Bonn, Halle, and Berlin, he taught at the universities of Berlin, Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), and Halle. A pioneer in the field of experimental psychology, he performed important experiments on the value of repetition in memory, using nonsense syllables that he invented. He also devised the Ebbinghaus completion method tests for measuring the intelligence of children. He wrote Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885; trans. 1913).