Anne Treisman
Research in my lab is concerned with visual attention, object
perception and memory. We explore the nature of the limits to human
perception, the information-processing that results in the perception
of objects and events, and the nature of the representations that
underlie both conscious experience and implicit memory, shown in
perceptual priming. We mainly use behavioral methods, but we are
interested in relating our findings to the brain. We have begun to
study patients with brain damage, and hope to collaborate in studies
using brain imaging or evoked responses.
Topics of research include the following:
Visual attention, search, and the "binding problem"
What kinds of information are available without focusing attention
when we are presented with multi-element arrays and what kinds
require focused attention? What variables control the deployment of
spatial attention? Physiological findings suggest that the visual
system sets up multiple specialized "maps" coding different aspects
of the scene; how then do we combine information about the separate
features of objects. Experimental tasks include visual search, and
divided attention paradigms in which irrelevant stimuli evoke
competing responses. I am collaborating in a detailed study of a
patient with bilateral parietal lesions linking his major deficits in
spatial localization to the large number of binding errors that he
also makes.
Object perception
We use novel shapes to probe the nature of the representations that
are formed in the absence of any matching representations or prior
knowledge. One project explores generalization from specific learned
orientations of novel objects to its three-dimensional shape. We are
also interested in the role of attention in forming object
representations, testing for example whether attention is necesary
for the perception of occlusion relations, identity and meaning.
Conscious awareness
We explore some conditions under which information is taken in
without being consciously accessible. For example, in a phenomenon
known as the "attentional blink", subjects search for two targets in
a stream of visual stimuli presented successively at high rates, and
appear to be blind to the second of two targets when they have just
detected the first. Awareness can also be blocked in "repetition
blindness": a repeated stimulus in a rapid sequential stream is much
less likely to be seen than a nonrepeated one.
Visual memory
Priming studies in my lab have shown that detailed representations of
unattended shapes are formed and can last for weeks without any
awareness or explicit memory of them. We are studying the nature of
these representations, the conditions under which they are formed,
and their relation to explicit memories formed with attention. We
also study perceptual learning through the effects of repeated
exposure and practice in visual tasks.
Curriculum Vitae
Citizenship: British; Resident in U.S.A.
Degrees: B.A. Cambridge, England. 1954 Modern and Medieval Languages
Tripos, Part 1, Class 1
1956 Part 2, Class 1 (Distinction)
1957 Natural Sciences Tripos, Psychology, Part 2, Class 1
D. Phil. Oxford, England. 1962 Thesis title: Selective Attention and
Speech Perception.
Marital status: Married, four children.
Research and Teaching Appointments
1961-63 Research Assistant to Professor R.C. Oldfield, Department of
Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford
1963-66 Member of M.R.C. Psycholinguistics Research Unit at the
Department of Experimental Psychology
College Lectureships at Trinity College, 1961-77, Somerville College,
1962-6
St. Anne's College, 1964-67
1966-67 Visiting Research Scientist at the Behavioral Sciences
Department of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New
Jersey
1967-78 Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford
1968-78 University Lecturer in Psychology, Oxford University
1977-78 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral
Sciences, Stanford, California
1978-86 Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia
1984-86 Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
1986-94 Professor of Psychology, University of California,
Berkeley
l99l-92 Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation, New York
1993 - Professor of Psychology, Princeton University
1995 - James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of
Psychology, Princeton University
Academic Honors
1953 Newnham College, Cambridge: Major Scholarship
1956 Research Scholarship
1963 Spearman medal of the British Psychological Society for
experimental research
1979 Elected to Society of Experimental Psychologists
1982-3 Killam Senior Fellowship
1982-3 James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award
1987 Invited, jointly with D. Kahneman, to give the Paul Fitts
Memorial lectures in May
1987 Invited to give the Fourteenth Annual Bartlett Lecture to the
Experimental Psychology Society, Britain in January
1989 Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, London
1990 Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental
Psychologists
1990 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American
Psychological Association
1991 Fellow of the American Psychological Society
1994 Invited to give the Association lecture to the International
Association for the study of Attention and Performance
1994 Elected to the National Academy of Sciences, as a Foreign
Associate.
1995 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1996 Golden Brain award of the Minerva Foundation (for "fundamental
breakthroughs that extend our knowledge of vision and the
brain").
Professional Societies
Member of Experimental Psychology Society (Britain)
Executive Committee member of the International Association for the
Study of Attention and Performance, 1977-1984
Member of Psychonomic Society
Member of Society of Experimental Psychologists, 1979
Elected to Governing Board of Psychonomic Society from January,
1985-1989. (Chair of Governing Board 1988-89).
Member of the Association for Research in Vision and
Opthalmology.
Member of Cognitive Neuroscience Society
Editorial Boards
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance,
1978-1988;
Canadian Journal of Psychology, 1985-1988;
Visual Cognition, 1992-
Other Professional Service
Member of Psychology Faculty Board, Oxford University, 1972-1977
Member of Appeals Board, University of British Columbia,
1982-1985
Publications Committee of the Psychonomic Society, 1987 - 1992
Advisory Board to Oxford University Press
Committee to evaluate Oxford University Psychology Department,
1991
Senate Task force on Faculty Diversity, University of California,
1990-1991
Warren Medal Committee, Society of Experimental Psychologists, 1992
-1994
APA Council of Science Advisors, 1993 -
US National Committee for the International Union of Psychological
Science, 1993 -
Review committee to evaluate the Department of Psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania, 1993.
Member of NIMH task force to draw up recommendations for future
funding, 1993.
McDonnell Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience Advisory Board,
1994-
Program Committee for the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience,
1994
Membership Section Panel in Physiology, Pharmacology, Neurobiology,
and Behavioral Biology of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1995-
Selected Publications
Book chapters
Treisman, A., & Davies, A., 1973. Divided attention to ear and
eye. In S. Kornblum (Ed.) Attention and Performance IV, Academic
Press, 101-117.
Treisman, A., Russell, R., & Green, J., 1975. Brief visual
storage of shape and movement. In P.M.A. Rabbitt & S. Dornic
(Eds.) Attention and Performance V: Academic Press, London.
699-721.
Treisman, A., 1979. The psychological reality of levels of
processing. In F. Craik & L. Cermak (Eds.) Levels of Processing
and Human Memory. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale, New
Jersey.
Kahneman, D., & Treisman, A., 1984. Changing views of attention
and automaticity. In R. Parasuraman & R. Davies (Eds.) Varieties
of Attention. New York: Academic Press, pp.29- 61.
Treisman, A., 1985. Preattentive processing in vision. Computer
Vision, Graphics and Image Processing, 31, 156-177, reprinted in Z.
Pylyshyn (Ed.) Computational processes in human vision: An
interdisciplinary perspective. Ablex: New Jersey, pp. 341-369.
Treisman, A., 1986. Properties, parts and objects. Chapter 35 in K.
Boff, L. Kaufman, & J. Thomas (Eds.) Handbook of Perception and
Human Performance, Vol. 2, Wiley, pp. 1-70.
Treisman, A., Cavanagh, P., Fischer, B., Ramachandran, V. and Van der
Heydt, R., 1990. Form perception and attention: striate cortex and
beyond. In Spillman, L., and Werner, J. (Eds.) Visual Perception: The
Neurophysiological Foundations, New York: Academic Press.
Treisman, A. 1993. The perception of features and objects. In A.
Baddeley and L. Weiskrantz (Eds.) Attention: Selection, awareness and
control. A tribute to Donald Broadbent. Oxford: Clarendon Press
University, pp. 5-35.
Treisman, A. & DeSchepper, B. 1996. Object tokens, attention, and
visual memory. In T. Inui and J. McClelland (Eds.) Attention and
Performance XVI: Information Integration in Perception and
Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 15-46.
Articles in refereed journals
Oswald, I., Taylor, A. & Treisman, M., 1960. Discriminative
responses to stimulation during human sleep. Brain, 83, 440-453.
Treisman, A., 1960. Contextual cues in selective listening. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 12, 242-248.
Treisman, A., 1962. Binocular rivalry and stereoscopic depth
perception. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 14,
23-37.
Treisman, A., 1964. Selective attention in man. British Medical
Bulletin, 20, 12-16.
Treisman, A., & Geffen, G. 1967. Selective attention: Perception
or response? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 19,
1-18.
Treisman, A., 1969. Strategies and models of selective attention.
Psychological Review, 76, 282- 299.
Treisman, A., & Fearnley, S., 1969. The Stroop Test: Selective
attention to colors and words. Nature, 222, 437-439.
Treisman, A., & Riley, J., 1969. Is selective attention selective
perception or selective response? A further test. Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 79, 27-34.
Treisman, A., & Squire, R., 1974. Listening to speech at two
levels at once. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 36,
82-97.
Treisman, A., & Gelade, G., 1980. A feature integration theory of
attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97-136.
Treisman, A., & Schmidt, H., 1982. Illusory conjunctions in the
perception of objects. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 107-141.
Treisman, A., 1982. Perceptual grouping and attention in visual
search for features and for objects. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8, 194-214.
Treisman, A., Kahneman,D., & Burkell, J. (1983). Perceptual
objects and the cost of filtering. Perception and Psychophysics, 33,
527-532.
Treisman, A., & Paterson, R., 1984. Emergent features, attention
and object perception, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Perception and Performance, 10, 12-21.
Treisman, A., 1986. Features and objects in visual processing,
Scientific American, 254, No. 11, 114-125.
Treisman, A., & Gormican, S., 1988. Feature analysis in early
vision: Evidence from search asymmetries. Psychological Review, 95,
15-48.
Treisman, A., 1988. Features and objects: The Fourteenth Bartlett
Memorial Lecture. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1988,
40A, (2) 201-237.
Musen, G. & Treisman, A., 1990. Implicit and explicit memory for
visual patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory
and Cognition, 16, 127-137.
Cavanagh, P., Arguin, M. and Treisman, A. 1990. Effects of surface
medium on visual search for orientation and size features. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 16,
479-491.
Treisman, A. & Sato, S., 1990. Conjunction search revisited.
Journal of Experimental Perception and Performance, 16, 459-478.
Treisman, A., 1991. Search, similarity and the integration of
features between and within dimensions. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27, 652-676.
Kahneman, D., Treisman, A. and Gibbs, B., 1992. The reviewing of
object files: Object-specific integration of information. Cognitive
Psychology, 24, 175-219.
Treisman, A., Vieira, A., & Hayes, A. 1992. Automaticity and
preattentive processing. American Journal of Psychology, 105,
341-362.
Treisman, A. 1992. Perceiving and re-perceiving objects. American
Psychologist, 47, 862-875.
Friedman-Hill, S.R., Robertson, L.C., & Treisman, A. 1995.
Parietal contributions to visual feature binding: Evidence from a
patient with bilateral lesions. Science, 269, 853-855
DeSchepper, B., & Treisman, A. 1996. Visual memory for novel
shapes: Implicit coding without attention. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22, 27- 47.
Treisman, A. 1996. The binding problem. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology, 6, 171-178.
3. Papers in press
Downing, P. & Treisman, A. 1996. The Line-Motion Illusion:
Attention or Impletion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Perception and Performance, in press.
Robertson, L. Treisman, A., Friedman-Hill, S. & Grabowecky, M.
1996. The interaction of spatial and object pathways: Evidence from
Balint's syndrome. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in press.
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