Every year at Kansas State University, a graduate student receives the Harry Helson Award recognition of excellence in scholarship and research in cognitive psychology.
Helson's parents separated, and he lived with his mother from birth until the age of ten in Chelsea, and then New Bedford, Massachusetts.
[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.
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.
[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.