Hermann Ebbinghaus - Other Contributions

Other Contributions

Ebbinghaus can also be credited with pioneering sentence completion exercises, which he developed in studying the abilities of schoolchildren. It was these same exercises that Alfred Binet had borrowed and incorporated into the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. Sentence completion had since then also been used extensively in memory research, especially in tapping into measures of implicit memory, and also has been used in psychotherapy as a tool to help tap into the motivations and drives of the patient. He had also influenced Charlotte Buhler, who along with Lev Vygotsky and others went on to study language meaning and society.

Ebbinghaus is also credited with discovering an optical illusion now known after its discoverer—the Ebbinghaus illusion, which is an illusion of relative size perception. In the best-known version of this illusion, two circles of identical size are placed near to each other and one is surrounded by large circles while the other is surrounded by small circles; the first central circle then appears smaller than the second central circle. This illusion is now used extensively in research in cognitive psychology, to find out more about the various perception pathways in our brain.

Ebbinghaus is also largely credited with drafting the first standard research report. In his paper on memory, Ebbinghaus arranged his research into four sections: the introduction, the methods, the results, and a discussion section. This clarity and organization of this format was so impressive to contemporaries that it has now become standard in the discipline and all research reports follow the same standards laid out by Ebbinghaus.

Unlike notable contemporaries like Titchener and James, Ebbinghaus did not promote any specific school of psychology nor was he known for extensive lifetime research, having only done three works. He had never attempted to bestow upon himself the title of the pioneer of experimental psychology, did not seek to have any “disciples”, and left the exploitation of the new field to others.