If you have studied a foreign language, you know that you start forgetting what you learn soon after you stop using it. But this phenomenon is not restricted only to foreign languages. In the 1880s, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus identified a “forgetting curve” when he found that people steadily forgot syllables they were given to remember over time. The forgetting followed a pattern represented below, which more recent experiments have confirmed (Murre & Dros, 2015) (Figure 1).
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