Georg Elias Müller (20 July 1850 – 23 December 1934) was a significant early German experimental psychologist who is credited with the theory of retroactive interference.

[2] Müller had difficulty deciding between history or philosophy, in order to make his decision he took two years off from Leipzig.

Though Müller does not share much of the same views as Hermann Lotze he credits him with his push towards psychology, research and critical thinking.

[3] In April 1881 he succeeded Lotze's position at Göttingen as privatdozent and established one of the first few experimental psychology laboratories in the world.

[4] Once a faculty member of Göttingen, he published Die Grundlegung der Psychophysik ("The Founding of Psychophysics")[4] which helped modify parts of Fechner's work.

Also during his early time as faculty at Göttingen he argued for falsification standards for experiments that offered a clear alternative theory.

[4] Later on in his career, in what Müller described as the golden years of the Göttingen laboratory, he produced the standard summary on psychophysics (Komplextheorie or sometimes constellation theory).

[4] His research with Rückle was on his extraordinary memory through the presentation of experimental results on the role of grouping in learning.

[1] Some of the participants in their experiment said that occasionally the nonsense syllables would come to mind between training sessions even when they were trying to suppress it, they called this perseveration.

This supported retroactive interference, the information from the paintings made it more difficult to remember the syllables from the first list.