The Virtual World of Verbal Learning: Simulating the Classic Memory Drum Experiment
Abstract
One paradigm for the study of human verbal learning and recall comes from the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus from the last quarter of the 19th century. His most influential contribution to Psychology is his 1885 text, Ueber das Gedaechtnis, or Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (Ebbinghaus 1885/1964). It is a masterful examination of the course of acquiring and recalling lists of nonsense syllables with himself as the single subject. The so-called rote method was the repetition of hundreds of consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense lists presented in serial order until a list was perfectly reproduced. The crude technology of his day was a weight-driven time devise not unlike a clock. The 2oth century equivalent was the popular electro-mechanical memory drum like the one manufactured by the Ralph Gebrands Company of Arlington MA. This paradigm produced literally thousands of published papers and textbooks in support of Associationism to explain the learning and recall (e.g., Underwood and Schulz, 1960). This paper presents a comparison between the standard electro-mechanical apparatus and a more modern computer-based methodology. The voracity of the rote learning paradigm was demonstrated in a comparison of 2 groups of subjects. Mean learning and recall results for the two groups by either method produced no significant differences. The results are interpreted as support for the view that the serial rote paradigm from Ebbinghaus is a robust characterization of the basic mechanisms of human verbal behavior.