Anne Treisman

Anne Treisman ( born September 2, 1935 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England ) is a British-American cognitive psychologist.

Treisman studied at Cambridge University and at the University of Oxford, where she earned a doctorate in 1962.

She is a professor of psychology at Princeton University.

Her main areas of research are perception and attention. Became known Treisman through the development of feature integration theory in 1980. In 2011 she was awarded the National Medal of Science.

Treisman is married to Daniel Kahneman and has four children.

The filter and the attenuation model of perception

Treisman has become particularly through its work on selective perception known. They modified the filter theory of attention Donald Broadbent to fit the empirical data. Broadbent had declared that human information processing capacity is so limited that only information from one channel can be processed. Thus, if the left ear just one input is processed, it can be observed by Broadbent in his right ear no other input.

However, these claims was contrary to the experimentally confirmed observation that people can hear the call of her name on the ear as to which of their attention is directed (see cocktail party effect ). Treisman therefore postulated a mechanism that performs a preliminary examination of the information. The ear, on the non- attention is directed, is not deaf, but only weakened ready to shoot after Treisman.

Important Papers

• 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 in between and within dimensions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27, 652-676.