Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve

By J. Murre, Joeri Dros. PLoS ONE, 2015

685 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a successful replication of Ebbinghaus’ classic forgetting curve from 1880 based on the method of savings. One subject spent 70 hours learning lists and relearning them after 20 min, 1 hour, 9 hours, 1 day, 2 days, or 31 days. The results are similar to Ebbinghaus' original data. We analyze the effects of serial position on forgetting and investigate what mathematical equations present a good fit to the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve and its replications. We conclude that the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve has indeed been replicated and that it is not completely smooth but most probably shows a jump upwards starting at the 24 hour data point.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67d994012430bdeba4d23e7c7215ba602115062c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Computer Networks and Communications

1. Xin Gao
2. Peng Yang

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Bernardo Pereira Nunes
2. Qing Wang
3. J. Brouwer
4. Ghodai M. Abdelrahman

In Statistics and Probability

1. Xin Gao
2. Bernardo Pereira Nunes
3. Peng Yang
4. Qing Wang
5. J. Brouwer
6. Ghodai M. Abdelrahman

Citations in the corpus

• Knowledge Tracing: A Survey (2022, background): “From an experimental psychology perspective, Hermann Ebbinghaus [29, 78] studied forces that affect memory retention, leading to formulate what is currently known as the learning curve theory [77].”
• A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model-based Agents (2024, neutral): “It stores some temporal information in short-term memory as an intermediate cache, which can simulate the memory mechanism of the human brain [28, 112].”
• Gamification of health professions education: a systematic review (2020, background): “Increased use of learning material generally indicated repetition, which is one of the most powerful variables to affect memory, leading to improved learning outcomes and retention (Hintzman 1976; Kerfoot et al. 2009; Murre and Dros 2015; Slamecka and McElree 1983).”
• SupportNet: solving catastrophic forgetting in class incremental learning with support data (2018, background): “On the other hand, a common strategy for human beings to overcome forgetting during learning is to review the old knowledge frequently (Murre and Dros, 2015).”