Anne Treisman

Anne Marie Treisman (née Taylor; 27 February 1935 – 9 February 2018) was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology.

Treisman researched visual attention, object perception, and memory.

Treisman received her BA in French Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1954.

She received a first class BA with distinction, which earned her a scholarship that she used to obtain a second BA in psychology.

During this extra year, Treisman studied under the supervision of Richard Gregory, who introduced her to various methods of exploring the mind through experiments in perception.

While at Cambridge, she was active in the folk music scene.

In 1957, Treisman attended Somerville College, Oxford, to work toward her DPhil under her advisor, Carolus Oldfield.

Treisman conducted research on aphasia, but soon pursued interest in non-clinical populations.

Treisman's research was guided by Donald Broadbent's book, Perception and Communication.

Treisman completed her thesis, "Attention and speech", in 1961.

Around the time Treisman was working toward her DPhil, psychology was shifting from a behaviorist point to view to the idea that behavior is the outcome of active information processing.

Donald Broadbent and Colin Cherry had recently introduced the idea of selective listening (often exemplified by the so-called "cocktail party effect") Broadbent later proposed a Filter Model of selective attention which states that unattended auditory information is not analysed but rather it is filtered out early in the process of perception.

This theory was criticised because it could not explain why unattended information sometimes gets through the "filter".

After receiving her DPhil, Treisman worked in the Medical Research Council's Psycholinguistics Research Unit at Oxford conducting research in selective listening.

In 1964, Treisman proposed her Attenuation Theory, which modified Broadbent's Filter model by stating that unattended information is attenuated rather than completely filtered out.

Treisman used a dichotic listening task during which participants heard multiple languages and different voices (male vs. female).

She showed that a difference between two equally known languages allowed no more efficient selection than a difference in subject matter between two messages in the same language.

Unknown foreign languages, however, produced less interference.

It appeared that complete rejection of one language was almost impossible; with some degree of variability depending on physical characteristics and language of the message received.

Treisman concluded that features of multiple incoming messages are successfully analysed, and that selection between messages in the same voice, intensity, and localisation takes place during, rather than before or after, this analysis, which results in the identification of their verbal content.

Information-handling capacity is limited following this analysis; the process handles one input at a time, either keeping to one message where possible, or switching between the two.

Thus, Broadbent's suggestion that classes of words constitute separate "input channels" could be rejected.

Her theory also indicated that physical characteristics are processed early, while semantic processing occurs at a later point.

Her work had an enormous impact on her field.

For example, In 1967, while working as a visiting scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories' psychology department, she published a paper in Psychological Review that was "central to the development of selective attention as a scientific field of study".

Treisman and Kahneman accepted positions at the University of British Columbia shortly after their marriage.

One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention, first published with Garry Gelade in 1980.

Treisman taught at the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University.

Notable postdoctoral fellows she supervised included Nancy Kanwisher and Nilli Lavie.

In 1980, Treisman and Gelade published their seminal paper on Feature Integration Theory (FIT).

One key element of FIT is that early stages of object perception encode features such as color, form, and orientation as separate entities; focused attention combines these distinct features into perceived objects.

Treisman moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, where she and Kahneman ran a joint "Attention Lab" in the Psychology Department.

From 1993 until her retirement, in 2010, Treisman was a member of the Psychology Department at Princeton University.

In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention.

During her long career, Treisman experimentally and theoretically defined the issue of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects that guide human thought and action.

Anne Treisman was born in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England.

Two years later, her family moved to a village near Rochester, Kent where her father, Percy Taylor, worked as chief education officer during World War II.

Her mother, Suzanne Touren, was French.

At the age of 11, Treisman moved with her family to Reading, Berkshire where she attended the girls' grammar school Kendrick School.

The English educational system at the time forced Treisman to choose only three subjects in her last two years at secondary school, and Treisman focused on the language arts (French, Latin and History).