ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates some of Hermann Ebbinghaus’s fundamental contributions to studying the learning process, laying the groundwork for all the work that has come since then. The performance benefits of learning time first documented by Hermann Ebbinghaus, surely are reflections in behavior of such structural plasticity in the brain. One danger in encouraging learners to use retrieval practice is that retrieval is not always successful, or sometimes can generate wrong answers. Several characteristics of perceptual priming illustrate how different the type of learning is from explicit memory. Skill learning usually proceeds from an effortful stage, which requires careful attention and conscious remembering and monitoring of individual steps to more fluid, less effortful performance.
