Ebbinghaus 
Ebbinghaus, Hermann
Perception /Vision
Perception is a very broad term, which covers all those cognitive/brain processes involved in receiving and interpreting information about our environment, via one of the sense organs. For example, vision involves an experience of objects in three dimensions, with a sense of how far they are from us, how large they are, how fast they are moving, and many other factors.Perception involves a complex chain of processing by the brain. The raw stimuli produced by sense organs such as eyes and ears is organised and interpreted by increasingly more complex brain processes into more holistic perceptions of objects having a certain size, distance, colour etc. The actual human experience of perception doesn't just involve receiving a series of disconnected visual or auditory impulses: a great deal of brain processing goes into organising this material into coherent entities. For example, instead of seeing a series of disconnected black and white stripes and blobs, there might be a perception of your cat leaping towards you. Some psychologists have tried to simulate perception via computer models (sometimes embodied in simple robots), and this has shown what complex processes perception involves.
Psychophysics
Psychophysics measures how people respond to basic physical sensations such as temperature and loudness, looking at things such as reaction times and sensory thresholds. A typical question for investigation would be, what is the minimum stimulus needed to perceive a particular sound?
Written by: Course Team
A lot of what he learned was forgotten within the first 24 hours but he was able to remember 30 days later much of what he could remember after 5 days.
He was the sole participant in his experiments and, to study memory objectively and avoid confounding variables, he devised stimulus material that he had not encountered before in his daily life and that had no meaning.
Nine years later, he moved to the university at Breslau where he conducted research on psychophysics (colour vision in particular) and educational psychology as well as on memory. He died of pneumonia in 1909.
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was born in Prussia and studied history and philology (historical linguistics) and then later philosophy.
In 1873, at Berlin University, he was awarded his doctorate, after writing a dissertation on the unconscious. Ebbinghaus travelled during the years 1873-1878, during which in Paris he came across a book, Elements of Psychophysics by Gustav Fechner, describing the scientific study of the perception of sensory stimulation.
His work challenged the then prevalent view that higher mental processes could not be studied experimentally (e.g. Wilhelm Wundt) and he is considered a founder of modern experimental psychology.
He created thousands of nonsense syllables, i.e. consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams that could be pronounced but were meaningless such as TUV and BUX. One of his findings, that has been replicated by other researchers, is that with small retention intervals (the time between learning and testing) forgetting rate is quite rapid but after that is slows down and becomes more gradual with longer retention intervals.
Ebbinghaus was not the first to think about memory but is considered one of the first to study it scientifically in the late 19th century.
He wanted to explore how long it would take to learn something, what factors would affect learning speed, how quickly would this learning be forgotten, and how quickly it could be relearned.
On his return to Berlin, three years later, Ebbinghaus applied this approach to study memory. In 1880 he became a lecturer at Berlin University and in 1885 he published his monograph on memory, demonstrating to others that it was possible to use the experimental, quantitative approach to the study of mental phenomena.
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