As THE authors indicate, this experiment was suggested by an apparent irregularity in Ebbinghaus' curve of forgetting. Was this irregularity due to the fact that during retention periods of less than 24 hours Ebbinghaus was continually awake whereas the 24-hour retention period involved several hours of sleep? The results of Jenkins and Dallenbach's study are very clear-cut. The student himself may wish to try to develop an hypothesis to account for them.EBBINGHAUS found that forgetting is a function of time: It is very rapid at first, but becomes progressively slower as time elapses. According to the results of his experiments, 41.8 per cent of a series of nonsense syllables, as measured by the Method of Savings, is forgotten after an interval of 20 minutes; 55.8 per cent is forgotten after 1 hour; 64.2 percent after 8.8 hours; 66.3 per cent after 1 day; 72.2 per cent after 2 days; 74.6 per cent after 6 days; and 78.9 per cent is forgotten after 31 days.The results for the 8.8-hour and i-day periods are the least satisfactory; for, as Ebbinghaus himself points out, the difference between the values for these successive periods is not of the same order as the differences between the values of the other successive periods. Between the 8.8-and 24-hour periods there is a difference of 2.1 per cent, whereas between the 24-and 48-hour periods the difference is 6.1 per cent; that is, in the later interval of 24 hours about 3 times as much is forgotten as during the earlier interval of 15 hours. "Such a relation," says Ebbinghaus, "is not credible, since, according to all the other figures, the decrease in the after-effect suffers, with increasing time, a marked retardation."Ebbinghaus did not think the figures credible even under the 271
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