Hermann Ebbinghaus: The Cognitive Process Of Memory

2. Literature Review
2.1 A brief history of memory research
Hermann Ebbinghaus (Figure 1), a German psychologist, was one of the first people that scientifically studied the cognitive processes of memory (Schwartz, 2013). His main interest was to understand the underlying mechanisms of memory formation and forgetting via learning (Moxon, 2000). For this reason he conducted a self-study, in which he created lists of nonsense syllables and more specifically of consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams (Foster, 2008). The study’s task was to learn the lists from memory up to the point that he could free recall all the syllables on each list. With the help of the experiments he studied the effects of associations between the lists, overlearning and reviewing

This model is consistent with Broadbent’s model and it could be interpreted as an elaboration of his model. Atkinson’s and Shiffrin’s model postulates a system with three distinct memory stores; the sensory store, which has a limited capacity of storage for a very short-time of period, the short-term store, with a limited storage capacity, but still greater than the sensory store and the long-term store, with a significantly larger capacity of information storage, that could theoretically retain the information even for a lifetime (Richardson-Klavehn, & Bjork , 2002). The model’s rational was that initially the information was paralleled processed by the buffers of the sensory store and then it was transferred into the short-term store in order to finally reach the long-term memory store (Baddeley, 1997). Additionally, Atkinson and Shiffrin were especially interested on the interaction between the long-term and short-term stores and for this reason they studied the mechanisms of transferring information from the one store to the other. They concluded that even thought the transferring of information from the short-term to the long-term store it may was not always easy, the application of three distinct acquisition strategies could actually substantially aid the transferability and thus the process of learning (Reed, 2012). More specifically, thse control processes/strategies are the following; coding (relate the information with existing knowledge), rehearsal (repeating the information) and imaging (to visually imagine verbal information) (Radomski & Latham,