I am dedicating this blog entry today on some important facts about Herman Ebbinghaus, since lately I have been trying to delve even more deeply into the history of psychology. Herman Ebbinghaus was born in Germany and was a pioneer with experimental memory research. He was known for his understanding of the forgetting curve-("the decline of memory retention in time") and the spacing effect-("humans more easily remember items in a list when they are studied a few times over a long period of time rather than studied repeatedly in a short period time"). Ebbinghaus was also the first to describe the learning curve-("graphical representation of the "average" rate of learning for an activity or tool"). Ebbinghaus was serious about showing that higher mental processes were not hidden away but could be studied through experimentation. Ebbinghaus conducted research on memory interestingly through what he called different nonsense syllables like BOL which sounds like BALL. Ebbinghaus is also renowned for pioneering sentence completion exercises, establishing the Ebbinghaus Illusion, which is an illusion of relative size perception and drafting the first standard research report. So these are just some of the many important influences of the prominent research Herman Ebbinghaus, who was even referred to once by Williams James as someone who had conducted "heroic studies" that were "the single most brilliant investigation in the history of psychology".