Harry Helson

Last updated
Harry Helson
BornNovember 9, 1898
Chelsea, Massachusetts
DiedOctober 13, 1977
Berkeley, California
SpouseLida Anderson

Harry Helson (November 9, 1898 - October 13, 1977) was an American psychologist and professor of psychology [1] who is best known for his adaptation-level theory. Most of his work and research focused on perception, with much of it involving the perception of color. His first published work was his doctoral dissertation on Gestalt psychology, which was published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1925 and 1926. Every year at Kansas State University, a graduate student receives the Harry Helson Award recognition of excellence in scholarship and research in cognitive psychology.

Contents

Early life and education

Helson was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts [2] to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Helson's parents separated, and he lived with his mother from birth until the age of ten in Chelsea, and then New Bedford, Massachusetts. Because of her ill health, Helson went to live with his father for a year, after which he left to live with his mother's friends until he was an adult. [3] [4]

Helson struggled with disciplinary issues in school; with the help of a teacher, he began serious studying in ninth grade and took part in extra-curricular activities. Helson attended Bowdoin College, a private, liberal arts school in Brunswick, Maine where he studied philosophy and psychology. Helson worked as a reporter for the college's newspaper and played the violin to fund his schooling. After earning an undergraduate degree at Bowdoin College, Helson attended Harvard University, planning a doctorate in philosophy, but changed his concentration to psychology by his second year after being introduced to Gestalt psychology. Helson wrote his dissertation on a critical review of Gestalt psychology, and received his Ph.D. in 1924. [5]

Career

Helson's doctoral dissertation from his time at Harvard University was published in the American Journal of Psychology in 1925 and 1926 and served as an introduction of Gestalt psychology in America, because most of the original research on Gestalt psychology was in German.

Helson joined the staff of Kansas State University. There he developed his adaptive-level theory of cognition. [6]

Helson also developed the principle of color conversion after working on photography in a darkroom. Although the lighting in the darkroom was red, Helson noticed that the end of his cigarette was green in color. This set off his interest in color conversion and resulted in ten years of experimentation that he would do on the topic. [5]

Helson died on October 13, 1977, in Berkeley, California.

The Adaptation-Level Theory

Helson developed the adaptation-level theory of psychology. This theory states that an individual's basis of judgment of a stimulus is based on their prior experiences as well as their recollections of how they perceived similar stimuli in the past. [7] [8] It is a theory used to interpret psychological findings, and it is still used today. [9]

Helson asserted that adaptation levels vary from person to person and in different situations. [10] The adaptation-level theory can be applied to attitudes, sounds, light, and many other concepts, although it began with Helson's experiments involving vision. Helson noticed that stimuli sometimes appeared to be without color when they were in monochromatic lighting, and the way the stimuli was viewed depended on the background. This finding led him to his recognition of how adaptation levels work in vision. [3]

The Harry Helson Award

The Harry Helson Award is given out every year to a graduate student at Kansas State University, where Helson was a professor from 1961 to 1968. The award is given to honor and remember Helson's contributions while at Kansas State University. The award was created by one of Helson's graduate students at the University, Dr. Lloyd Avant. Helson's son, Henry Helson, a retired professor from the University of California Berkeley, is a supporter of this award. The award is presented to a graduate student based on excellence in scholarship and research. [11] Past recipients:

Related Research Articles

Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Color constancy</span> How humans perceive color

Color constancy is an example of subjective constancy and a feature of the human color perception system which ensures that the perceived color of objects remains relatively constant under varying illumination conditions. A green apple for instance looks green to us at midday, when the main illumination is white sunlight, and also at sunset, when the main illumination is red. This helps us identify objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wolfgang Köhler</span> German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Wolfgang Köhler was a German psychologist and phenomenologist who, like Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka, contributed to the creation of Gestalt psychology.

Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these.

Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".

Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy(GTP) is a method of psychotherapy based strictly on Gestalt psychology. Its origins go back to the 1920s when Gestalt psychology founder Max Wertheimer, Kurt Lewin and their colleagues and students started to apply the holistic and systems theoretical Gestalt psychology concepts in the field of psychopathology and clinical psychology. Through holism, "a person's thinking, feeling, actions, perceptions, attitudes and logical operations" are seen as one unity. Many developments in psychotherapy in the following decades drew from these early beginnings, like e.g. group psychoanalysis (S. Foulkes), Gestalt therapy (Laura Perls, Fritz Perls, Goodman, and others), or Katathym-imaginative Psychotherapy (Hanscarl Leuner).

James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.

Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edwin Ray Guthrie</span> American psychologist (1886–1959)

Edwin Ray Guthrie was a behavioral psychologist who began his career as a mathematics teacher and philosopher. But, he became a psychologist at the age of 33. He spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he became a full professor and then an emeritus professor in psychology.

Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georg Elias Müller</span> German experimental psychologist

Georg Elias Müller was a significant early German experimental psychologist who is credited with the theory of retroactive interference.

Structuralism in psychology is a theory of consciousness developed by Edward Bradford Titchener. This theory was challenged in the 20th century.

Scholar, educator, and philanthropist Herschel Leibowitz is widely recognized for his research in visual perception and for his symbiotic approach to conducting research that both advanced theory and helped in the understanding and relief of societal problems. His research on transportation safety included studies of nearsightedness during night driving, vision during civil twilight, an illusion that underlies the behavior of motorists involved in auto-train collisions, susceptibility of pilots to illusions caused by visual-vestibular interactions, and the design of aircraft instrument panels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jean-Claude Falmagne</span>

Jean-Claude Falmagne is a mathematical psychologist whose scientific contributions deal with problems in reaction time theory, psychophysics, philosophy of science, measurement theory, decision theory, and educational technology. Together with Jean-Paul Doignon, he developed knowledge space theory, which is the mathematical foundation for the ALEKS software for the assessment of knowledge in various academic subjects, including K-12 mathematics, chemistry, and accounting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chingis Izmailov</span> Russian neuroscientist (1944–2011)

Chingis A. Izmailov was a Russian psychophysiologist and psychophysicist, the principal author of the spherical model of color space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hans Wallach</span>

Hans Wallach was a German-American experimental psychologist whose research focused on perception and learning. Although he was trained in the Gestalt psychology tradition, much of his later work explored the adaptability of perceptual systems based on the perceiver's experience, whereas most Gestalt theorists emphasized inherent qualities of stimuli and downplayed the role of experience. Wallach's studies of achromatic surface color laid the groundwork for subsequent theories of lightness constancy, and his work on sound localization elucidated the perceptual processing that underlies stereophonic sound. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

The range–frequency compromise in judgment is a theory in cognitive psychology developed by Allen Parducci in the mid-1960s. Range–frequency is descriptive of how judgments reflect a compromise between a range principle that assigns each category to an equal subrange of contextual stimuli and a frequency principle that assigns each of the categories to the same number of contextual stimuli. Each judgment is a weighted average of what it would have been judged were it to follow just the range or just the frequency principle. A crucial deduction from the theory is that the mean of all judgments is proportionate to the skew of the frequency distribution of the context under which the judgment is made, assuming that the context is an unbiased representation of the stimuli that are judged.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russell L. De Valois</span>

Russell L. De Valois was an American scientist recognized for his pioneering research on spatial and color vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Henle</span> American university teacher and psychologist (1913-2007)

Mary Henle was an American psychologist who's known most notably for her contributions to Gestalt Psychology and for her involvement in the American Psychological Association. Henle also taught at the New School of Social Research in New York; she was involved in the writing of eight book publications and also helped develop the first psychology laboratory manual in 1948 based on the famous works of Kurt Lewin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kurt Koffka</span> German psychologist and professor (1886–1941)

Kurt Koffka was a German psychologist and professor. He was born and educated in Berlin, Germany; he died in Northampton, Massachusetts, from coronary thrombosis. He was influenced by his maternal uncle, a biologist, to pursue science. He had many interests including visual perception, brain damage, sound localization, developmental psychology, and experimental psychology. He worked alongside Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler to develop Gestalt psychology. Koffka had several publications including "The Growth of the Mind: An Introduction to Child Psychology" (1924) and "The Principles of Gestalt Psychology" (1935) which elaborated on his research.

References

  1. ↑ Agnes N. O'Connell; Nancy Felipe Russo (18 March 2014). Models of Achievement: Reflections of Eminent Women in Psychology. Taylor & Francis. pp. 159–. ISBN   978-1-317-78589-7.
  2. ↑ Hall, Granville Stanley; Titchener, Edward Bradford; Dallenbach, Karl M.; Bentley, Madison; Boring, Edwin Garrigues; Washburn, Margaret Floy (1979). The American Journal of Psychology. Vol. 92. p. 153.
  3. 1 2 Helson, H. (1967). Harry Helson. In E. G. Boring D. Lindzey (Eds.), A history of psychology in autobiography (pp. 193-220). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
  4. ↑ William Poundstone (9 January 2011). Priceless: The Hidden Psychology of Value. Oneworld Publications. pp. 36–. ISBN   978-1-78074-033-1.
  5. 1 2 Bevan, W. (1979). Harry Helson: 1898-1977. The American Journal of Psychology, 92(1), 153-160.
  6. ↑ William R. Uttal (27 June 2014). A Taxonomy of Visual Processes. Psychology Press. pp. 84–. ISBN   978-1-317-66895-4.
  7. ↑ Adaptation-Level Theory. In Oxford Reference. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095350211.
  8. ↑ Hasan M. El-Shamy (1999). Tales Arab Women Tell and the Behavioral Patterns They Portray. Indiana University Press. pp. 56–. ISBN   0-253-33529-9.
  9. ↑ Masin, S. C. (1999). Harry Helson, what did you do? In P. R. Killeen & W. R. Uttal (Eds.), Proceedings of the fifteenth annual meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics, Tempe, AZ: International Society for Psychophysics (pp. 302-307).
  10. ↑ Jon E. Roeckelein (1998). Dictionary of Theories, Laws, and Concepts in Psychology. Greenwood Publishing Group. pp. 231–. ISBN   978-0-313-30460-6.
  11. ↑ The Harry Helson Award. Retrieved from: https://www.k-state.edu/psych/graduate/graduate_Helson_Award.htm Archived 2015-03-09 at the Wayback Machine
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.