Question

198. One of the earliest psychologists to study memory and forgetting was

Herman Ebbinghaus, who used himself as a subject to test his own recall
of a list of nonsense syllables, previously learned through rehearsal. From
his work he came up with the concept of a forgetting curve. Th is suggests:
(A) Remembering nonsense syllables can be encoded faster than
meaningful information.
(B) Old information will interfere with new information being encoded
into LTM.
(C) New information will interfere with old information already stored in
LTM.
(D) Recall of meaningless information drops very soon after initial
learning and then levels off .
(E) Recall of meaningless information cannot be retrieved more than
three hours after encoding

Answer 1

Herman Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve, illustrating that memory for new information decays rapidly initially and then levels off, which means answer option (D) is correct.

Step-by-step explanation:

Herman Ebbinghaus was a pioneer in the field of memory research. He conducted an extensive series of experiments on himself to study memory and forgetting, particularly focusing on the patterns of memorization and loss over time. In his seminal work, Ebbinghaus discovered that memory for new information decays rapidly at first but then levels out over time, a phenomenon now known as the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.

The correct answer to the question presented is (D): Recall of meaningless information drops very soon after initial learning and then levels off. This encapsulates Ebbinghaus's finding that after an initial period of rapid forgetting, the rate at which we lose memories slows considerably. The work of Ebbinghaus laid the foundation for future research in the field of cognitive psychology and the understanding of memory processes.