Anne Treisman
British-born American cognitive psychologist of attention
British-born psychologist who worked at Oxford, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton. She proposed the attenuation model of attention and, with Garry Gelade, feature integration theory.
Why this person matters
Treisman revised Broadbent's filter model and later explained how separately coded visual features are bound into objects. Feature integration theory generated a large body of later experiments in vision and attention.
Main contributions
Attenuation model (1964)
Treisman modified Broadbent's filter model so that unattended messages are weakened, not blocked. In listening experiments, unknown foreign languages caused less interference than familiar ones, suggesting that unattended messages are analysed to some degree.
Feature integration theory
Published with Garry Gelade in 1980. Features such as colour and form are encoded even without focused attention, and attention binds them into recognised objects.
Illusory conjunctions
In brief displays, participants sometimes reported features from different objects as combined, for example a blue triangle and a red circle seen as a blue circle and a red triangle. The errors supported the binding account.
Context and limits
Treisman's attenuation model responded to a difficulty in Broadbent's filter model: unattended information sometimes gets through. Her illusory conjunction results come from brief laboratory displays. The sources read do not describe later critiques of feature integration theory, so they are not assessed here.
In your introductory course
Sensation and perception.Appears in attention and visual search sections of perception and cognition chapters, including the binding problem and the conjunction search demonstration.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 5.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1964
Proposed the attenuation model of selective attention.
- 1980
Published A Feature Integration Theory of Attention with Garry Gelade.
- 1989
Elected to the Royal Society of London.
- 1993
Joined the Princeton University faculty.
- 2013
Received the National Medal of Science.
Sources
- Association for Psychological Science, Anne Treisman, 1935 to 2018Society or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Princeton Alumni Weekly, In Memoriam: Anne TreismanUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Anne TreismanReference work. Reference article inspected.