The preceding people were essentially philosophers, not scientists. The first psychologist who made an effort to study association scientifically was Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on January 23, 1850, in Barmen, Germany. His father was a wealthy merchant, who encouraged his son to study. Hermann attended the University of Halle and the University of Berlin, and received his doctorate from the University of Bonn in 1873. While traveling through Europe, he came across a copy of Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics, which turned him on to psychology.

Ebbinghaus worked on his research at home in Berlin and published a book called On Memory:  An Investigation in Experimental Psychology in 1885.  Basically, his research involved the memorization of nonsense syllables, which consisted of a consonant, a vowel, and another consonant.  He would select a dozen words, then attempt to master the list.  He recorded the number of trials it took, as well as the effects of variations such as relearning old material, or the meaningfulness of the syllables.  The results have been confirmed and are still valid today.

He also wrote the first article on intelligence testing of school children, and devised a sentence completion test that became a part of the Binet-Simon test.  He also published textbooks on psychology in 1897 and 1902 that were very popular for many years.  Hermann Ebbinghaus died in 1909, a clear precursor to today’s cognitive movement.

The laws of association would continue to have a powerful influence in psychology.  The Behaviorists, of course, focused on stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response associations. The Gestalt psychologists elaborated on the various associations they termed the laws of Prägnanz.  Among the cognitive psychologists, there are various theories of semantic association.  And the physiological psychologists talk about the neurological bases for association.  The idea appears to be here to stay.  But then, as Greek and Medieval philosophers knew, association is just a simple description of a commonplace occurrance!