Anne Treisman
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Anne Marie Treisman (née Taylor; 27 February 1935 – 9 February 2018) was an English
psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and explanation, interpretatio ...
who specialised in
cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...
. Treisman researched visual
attention Attention or focus, is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is the selective concentration on discrete information, either subjectively or objectively. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...
, object
perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...
, and
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembe ...
. 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 The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
,
University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...
,
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
, and
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
. Notable postdoctoral fellows she supervised included Nancy Kanwisher and Nilli Lavie. In 2013, Treisman received the
National Medal of Science The National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral science, behavior ...
from President
Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. O ...
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.


Early life and education

Anne Treisman was born in
Wakefield Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 109,766 in the 2021 census, up from 99,251 in the 2011 census. The city is the administrative centre of the wider Metropolit ...
,
West Riding of Yorkshire The West Riding of Yorkshire was one of three historic subdivisions of Yorkshire, England. From 1889 to 1974 the riding was an administrative county named County of York, West Riding. The Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, lieu ...
, England on 27 February 1935. Two years later, her family moved to a village near
Rochester, Kent Rochester ( ) is a town in the unitary authority of Medway, in Kent, England. It is at the lowest bridging point of the River Medway, about east-southeast of London. The town forms a conurbation with neighbouring towns Chatham, Kent, Chatham, ...
where her father, Percy Taylor, worked as chief education officer during
World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
. Her mother, Suzanne Touren, was French. At the age of 11, Treisman moved with her family to
Reading, Berkshire Reading ( ) is a town and borough in Berkshire, England, and the county town of Berkshire. It is the United Kingdom's largest town, with a combined population of 355,596. Most of Reading built-up area, its built-up area lies within the Borough ...
where she attended the girls' grammar school
Kendrick School Kendrick School is a selective girls' grammar school situated in the centre of Reading, Berkshire, UK. In February 2011, Kendrick became an Academy. History The school is named after John Kendrick, a Reading cloth merchant who died in 1624. ...
. 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). Treisman received her BA in French Literature at
Newnham College, Cambridge Newnham College is a women's constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1871 by a group organising Lectures for Ladies, members of which included philosopher Henry Sidgwick and suffragist campaigner Millicen ...
, 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 Richard Langton Gregory, (24 July 1923 – 17 May 2010) was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol. Life and career Richard Gregory was born in London. He was the son of Christopher Clive Lan ...
, who introduced her to various methods of exploring the mind through experiments in perception. Wikibooks:Applied History of Psychology/History of Research on Attention While at Cambridge, she was active in the
folk music Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be ca ...
scene. In 1957, Treisman attended
Somerville College, Oxford Somerville College is a Colleges of the University of Oxford, constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. It was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. It began admitting men in 1994. The colle ...
, to work toward her
DPhil A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...
under her advisor, Carolus Oldfield. Treisman conducted research on
aphasia Aphasia, also known as dysphasia, is an impairment in a person's ability to comprehend or formulate language because of dysfunction in specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine, but aph ...
, 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.


Career

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 Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
' psychology department, she published a paper in ''
Psychological Review ''Psychological Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers psychological theory. It was established by James Mark Baldwin (Princeton University) and James McKeen Cattell (Columbia University) in 1894 as a publication vehic ...
'' 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 The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...
shortly after their marriage. 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. She was named Princeton's James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology in 1995. Her work has appeared in 29 book chapters and more than 80 journal articles and is heavily cited in the psychological literature, as well as prominently included in both introductory and advanced textbooks. Established with an anonymous gift in 2015, the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, housed in Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, honors the legacy of Daniel Kahneman and Anne Treisman.


Feature integration theory

Treisman's feature integration theory is a two-stage model of visual object perception: ;Pre-attentive stage The first stage is called "pre-attentive" because it happens automatically, or without effort or attention by the perceiver. In this stage, an object is broken down into its elementary features for processing (i.e., color,
texture Texture may refer to: Science and technology * Image texture, the spatial arrangement of color or intensities in an image * Surface texture, the smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object * Texture (roads), road surface c ...
,
shape A shape is a graphics, graphical representation of an object's form or its external boundary, outline, or external Surface (mathematics), surface. It is distinct from other object properties, such as color, Surface texture, texture, or material ...
, etc.). Treisman posits we are unaware of this stage of attention because it occurs quickly and early in perceptual processes (before conscious awareness). Evidence for the pre-attentive state comes from Treisman's own studies. In a well-known study, Treisman created a display of four objects flanked by two black numbers. The display flashed on a computer screen for 1/5 of a second and followed by a random-dot masking field to eliminate residual perception of the stimuli after the stimuli were turned off. Participants were asked to first report on the black numbers, followed by what they saw at each of the four locations where the shapes had been. Under these conditions, participants reported seeing illusory conjunctions in 18% of trials. That is, participants reported seeing objects that consisted of a combination of features from two different stimuli. For example, after seeing a big yellow circle, a big blue triangle, a small red triangle, and a small green circle, a person might report seeing a small red circle and a small green triangle. The reason illusory conjunctions occurred is that stimuli were presented rapidly and the observers' attention was distracted from the target object by having them focus on the black numbers; thus, elementary features had not yet been grouped or bound to an object. Having participants attend to the target objects eliminated the illusory conjunction. ;Focused attention stage The second stage of processing depends on attention. In this stage, the features are combined, resulting in the perception of a whole object rather than individual features. Treisman linked this process of binding to neural activity, noting that an object causes activity in both the "what" and "where" areas of the cortex (see
Two-streams hypothesis The two-streams hypothesis is a model of the neural processing of vision as well as hearing. The hypothesis, given its initial characterisation in a paper by David Milner and Melvyn A. Goodale in 1992, argues that humans possess two distinct vis ...
). Activity in the "what" processing stream would include information about color and form, while activity in the "where" stream would include information about location and motion. According to Treisman, attention is the "glue" that combines the information from both streams and causes us to perceive all the features of an object as combined at one specific location. Perceiving one object in isolation appears relatively straightforward, but when we confront multiple objects, numerous features may exist at different locations. The perceptual system's task is to associate each of these features with the object to which it belongs. Feature integration theory says that in order for this to occur, we need to focus our attention on each object in turn. Once we attend to a particular location, the features at that location are bound together and are associated with the object at that location. Treisman's FIT model uses three different spatially selective mechanisms to solve the binding problem: selection by a spatial attention window, inhibition of locations from feature maps containing unwanted features, and top-down activation of the location containing the attended object.


The binding problem

William James William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he is considered to be one of the leading thinkers of the late 19th c ...
discussed the connection between attention and mental processes, "Millions of items…are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to…Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others." In the early 1980s, neuroscientists such as
Torsten Wiesel Torsten Nils Wiesel (born 3 June 1924) is a Swedish Neurophysiology, neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; ...
and David H. Hubel were discovering that different areas of the primate visual cortex were finely tuned to selective features, such as line orientation, luminance, color, movement, etc. These findings prompted the question of how these distinct features are connected into a unified whole. This question has been called the
binding problem The unity of consciousness and (cognitive) binding problem is the problem of how objects, background, and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience. The binding problem refers to the overall encoding of our brain circuit ...
. For example, when you see a red ball roll by, cells sensitive to movement fire in the medial temporal cortex, while cells sensitive to color, shape and location fire in other areas. Despite all this distinct neuronal firing, you don't perceive the ball as separated by shape, movement and color perceptions; you experience an integrated experience with all these components occurring together. The question of how these elements are combined is the essence of the binding problem, a central focus of research into the late 1990s. A number of possible mechanisms were envisaged, including grandmother cells responding to specific conjunctions of features that uniquely identify a particular object; local cell assemblies onto which the pathways from different feature maps converge, perhaps with adjustable connections allowing flexible routing of signals; a serial scan of different spatial areas selected by an adjustable attention window, conjoining the features that each contains and excluding features from adjacent areas; detection of temporal contiguity – parts and properties whose onset, offset or motion coincide probably belong to the same object synchronised firing of cells responding to features of the same object, perhaps assisted by oscillatory neural activity. Treisman used failures of binding to shed light on its underlying mechanisms. Specifically, she found that left-brain-damaged patients have increasing illusory conjunctions and decreased performance in a spatially cued attention task, which suggests a link between attentional binding and the parietal lobes. Treisman also cited corroborating evidence from
positron emission tomography Positron emission tomography (PET) is a functional imaging technique that uses radioactive substances known as radiotracers to visualize and measure changes in metabolic processes, and in other physiological activities including blood flow, r ...
and
event-related potential An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sense, sensory, cognition, cognitive, or motor system, motor event. More formally, it is any stereotyped electrophysiology, electrophysiologi ...
studies which were consistent with the spatial attention account of feature integration. Treisman's work formed the basis for thousands of experiments in
cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...
, vision sciences,
cognitive science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...
, cognitive neuropsychology and
cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the Biology, biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental ...
.


Honors

Treisman was elected to the
Royal Society of London The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, r ...
in 1989, the US National Academy of Sciences in 1994, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...
in 1995, and the
American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS) is an American scholarly organization and learned society founded in 1743 in Philadelphia that promotes knowledge in the humanities and natural sciences through research, professional meetings, publicat ...
in 2005, as well as a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 2002. Treisman was the recipient of the 2009
University of Louisville The University of Louisville (UofL) is a public university, public research university in Louisville, Kentucky, United States. It is part of the Kentucky state university system. Chartered in 1798 as the Jefferson Seminary, it became in the 19t ...
Grawemeyer Award The Grawemeyer Awards () are five awards given annually by the University of Louisville. The prizes are presented to individuals in the fields of education, ideas improving world order, music composition, religion, and psychology. The religion awa ...
in Psychology for her explanation of how our brains build meaningful images from what we see. In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention.


Selected publications

Key works include: * * *


Personal life

Treisman married Michel Treisman in 1960, another Oxford graduate student. They divorced in 1976. She remarried in 1978 to
Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; ; March 5, 1934 – March 27, 2024) was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memor ...
, who won the
Nobel Memorial Prize The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (), commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics(), is an award in the field of economic sciences adminis ...
for Economics in 2002. She had four children
Jessica Treisman
(b. 1963), a professor of cell biology at NYU School of Medicine
Daniel Treisman
(b. 1964), a professor of political science at UCLA; Stephen Treisman (b. 1968), who lives in Berkshire; and Deborah Treisman (b. 1970), a fiction editor at ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
''. She died on 9 February 2018, from a
stroke Stroke is a medical condition in which poor cerebral circulation, blood flow to a part of the brain causes cell death. There are two main types of stroke: brain ischemia, ischemic, due to lack of blood flow, and intracranial hemorrhage, hemor ...
, at her home in
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
.


See also

* Subitizing


References


Further reading

*


External links


Treisman's homepage at Princeton

Treisman's Academic CV

Video of Treisman talking about her work
from the National Science & Technology Medals Foundation
"One on one... with Anne Treisman"
at '' The Psychologist'', published November 2010 {{DEFAULTSORT:Treisman, Anne 1935 births English psychologists 2018 deaths Princeton University faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the Society of Experimental Psychologists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Female fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Society Cognitive psychologists Women cognitive scientists Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society National Medal of Science laureates Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford Members of the American Philosophical Society Corresponding fellows of the British Academy APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology recipients