Anne Treisman
Encyclopedia
Anne Marie Treisman FRS
(born February 27, 1935 in Wakefield
, Yorkshire
) is a psychologist
currently at Princeton University
's Department of Psychology
. She researches visual attention
, object perception
, and memory
. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention
, first published with G. Gelade in 1980. Treisman is married to Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman
.
Another influential idea, Jeremy Wolfe's theory called Guided Search, took many ideas from the feature integration theory and most works in the field of visual attention that work with the concept of a saliency map reference back to her feature integration theory.
and the Royal Society of London.
She received the William James Fellow Award in 2002. The quote is as follows:
Anne Treisman is one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the world today. For over 40 years she has been defining fundamental issues of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects and memories that guide human thought and action. Her creativity and insight have often challenged investigators to think outside the box
, to reach beyond their own specialties and to address the hard questions of human cognition.
Very early in her career, Treisman published a paper in Psychological Review that was central to the development of selective attention as a scientific field of study. This paper articulated many of the basic issues that continue to be fundamental and guide studies of attention to this day. Some years later she proposed an enormously influential theory called Feature Integration Theory (FIT) which has had broad impact both within and outside psychology. Her studies demonstrated that early vision encodes features such as color, form, orientation, and others, in separate "feature maps" and that without spatial attention these features can bind randomly to form illusory conjunctions and deficits in selection. This work has formed the basis for thousands of experiments in cognitive psychology
, vision sciences, cognitive science
, neuropsychology
and cognitive neuroscience
.
At about the same time as FIT was proposed, neuroscientists were independently discovering that the primate cortex contained many different cortical areas where neurons were tuned to selective features (for example, orientation, luminance, color, shape, size, motion, and so on). The neuroscience community was abuzz with the question of how the brain solved the "binding problem": how did the visual system recombine features into the unified wholes we see? Again, Treisman saw the problem from a fresh perspective. By testing patients with selective attention problems, she and her students and colleagues first demonstrated that the binding problem could be a real problem in everyday life and that one solution to the binding problem required spatial attention. These findings have had broad impact, spurring a multitude of imaging, electrophysiological and neuropsychological studies.
From time to time Treisman continues to change the course of study within the field through her critical probing and broad perspective. She continues to be a persuasive figure in the field and seems to never tire in her enthusiasm for understanding the human mind. For the past four decades she has introduced creative methods and innovative solutions for some of the more challenging questions in psychology, including how the brain selects information for conscious awareness and how information that is encoded in bits and pieces is integrated to form the unified world we see. It would be hard to overestimate the contributions Anne Treisman has made to the science of psychology over the course of her career.
Treisman was the recipient of the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award
for Psychology.
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
(born February 27, 1935 in Wakefield
Wakefield
Wakefield is the main settlement and administrative centre of the City of Wakefield, a metropolitan district of West Yorkshire, England. Located by the River Calder on the eastern edge of the Pennines, the urban area is and had a population of 76,886 in 2001....
, Yorkshire
Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a historic county of northern England and the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its great size in comparison to other English counties, functions have been increasingly undertaken over time by its subdivisions, which have also been subject to periodic reform...
) is a psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
currently at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
's Department of Psychology
Princeton University Department of Psychology
The Princeton University Department of Psychology, located in Green Hall, is an academic department of Princeton University on the corner of Washington St. and William St. in Princeton, New Jersey. For over a century, the department has been one of the most notable psychology departments in the...
. She researches visual attention
Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....
, object perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
, and memory
Memory
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and recall information and experiences. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing memory....
. One of her most influential ideas is the feature integration theory of attention
Feature integration theory
The feature integration theory, developed by Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade since the early 1980s, posits that different kinds of attention are responsible for binding different features into consciously experienced wholes...
, first published with G. Gelade in 1980. Treisman is married to Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....
.
Feature integration theory
According to this theory, different kinds of attention are responsible for binding different features into consciously experienced wholes. The theory of feature integration is very dominant in the field of visual attention to this day. This idea has been disputed. Researchers (Krisjánsson, Nakamura) have shown that the effect of priming can count for the process which Treisman refers to as top down guidance. This was clear when participants were only asked to spot the different object. They couldn't have any top down guidance because they did not know what to look for. And even if they didn't know what to look for they had similar results as did participants in the Treisman study.Another influential idea, Jeremy Wolfe's theory called Guided Search, took many ideas from the feature integration theory and most works in the field of visual attention that work with the concept of a saliency map reference back to her feature integration theory.
Honors
She is a member of the National Academy of SciencesUnited States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
and the Royal Society of London.
She received the William James Fellow Award in 2002. The quote is as follows:
Anne Treisman is one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the world today. For over 40 years she has been defining fundamental issues of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects and memories that guide human thought and action. Her creativity and insight have often challenged investigators to think outside the box
Thinking outside the box
Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking....
, to reach beyond their own specialties and to address the hard questions of human cognition.
Very early in her career, Treisman published a paper in Psychological Review that was central to the development of selective attention as a scientific field of study. This paper articulated many of the basic issues that continue to be fundamental and guide studies of attention to this day. Some years later she proposed an enormously influential theory called Feature Integration Theory (FIT) which has had broad impact both within and outside psychology. Her studies demonstrated that early vision encodes features such as color, form, orientation, and others, in separate "feature maps" and that without spatial attention these features can bind randomly to form illusory conjunctions and deficits in selection. This work has formed the basis for thousands of experiments in cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology exploring internal mental processes.It is the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems.Cognitive psychology differs from previous psychological approaches in two key ways....
, vision sciences, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, neuropsychology
Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology studies the structure and function of the brain related to specific psychological processes and behaviors. The term neuropsychology has been applied to lesion studies in humans and animals. It has also been applied to efforts to record electrical activity from individual cells in...
and cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological substrates underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes. It addresses the questions of how psychological/cognitive functions are produced by the brain...
.
At about the same time as FIT was proposed, neuroscientists were independently discovering that the primate cortex contained many different cortical areas where neurons were tuned to selective features (for example, orientation, luminance, color, shape, size, motion, and so on). The neuroscience community was abuzz with the question of how the brain solved the "binding problem": how did the visual system recombine features into the unified wholes we see? Again, Treisman saw the problem from a fresh perspective. By testing patients with selective attention problems, she and her students and colleagues first demonstrated that the binding problem could be a real problem in everyday life and that one solution to the binding problem required spatial attention. These findings have had broad impact, spurring a multitude of imaging, electrophysiological and neuropsychological studies.
From time to time Treisman continues to change the course of study within the field through her critical probing and broad perspective. She continues to be a persuasive figure in the field and seems to never tire in her enthusiasm for understanding the human mind. For the past four decades she has introduced creative methods and innovative solutions for some of the more challenging questions in psychology, including how the brain selects information for conscious awareness and how information that is encoded in bits and pieces is integrated to form the unified world we see. It would be hard to overestimate the contributions Anne Treisman has made to the science of psychology over the course of her career.
Treisman was the recipient of the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award
Grawemeyer Award
The Grawemeyer Awards are five awards given annually by the University of Louisville in the state of Kentucky, United States. The prizes are presented to individuals in the fields of education, ideas improving world order, music composition, religion, and psychology...
for Psychology.
Works
Key works include:- Treisman, A., & Gelade, G., 1980. A feature integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136.
- Treisman, A., 1991. Search, similarity and the integration of features between and within dimensions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 17, 652-676.