• DOI:10.3758/s13414-018-1563-2
• Corpus ID: 49386674

Anne Marie Treisman (1935–2018)

@article{Evans2018AnneMT,
  title={Anne Marie Treisman (1935–2018)},
  author={Karla K. Evans},
  journal={Attention, Perception, \& Psychophysics},
  year={2018},
  volume={80},
  pages={1027-1029}
}

• K. Evans
• Published 22 June 2018
• Psychology
• Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

On February 9, 2018, the worlds of psychology and cognitive science lost one of their most notable and influential figures, Anne Marie Treisman. Treisman died at her home in New York City surrounded by her family at the age of 82. A brilliant, insightful psychologist, Anne embodied the rare combination of rigorous experimentalist and daring theoretician. Her passion for discovery and insatiable curiosity is evident in all her scientific work. Anne’s insights, original ideas, and fundamental discoveries have inspired and influenced generations, both in the world of cognitive science and beyond, and will continue to do so for years to come. At the same time, her uniquely impressive and unforgettable persona will continue to serve as an example for all those who knew her— family, friends, students, and colleagues. Anne Treisman’s life, as well as her career, transcended national, scientific, and gender boundaries. Born on February 27, 1935, to a French mother and British father, Anne Marie Taylor’s early years were spent in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England. Anne was cosmopolitan, with a diverse and international extended family that was mirrored in her academic family, as well. After spending the first part of her life in the United Kingdom, she lived and worked over the next 40 years in two other countries, Canada and the United States. As she wrote in her autobiography for the Society for Neuroscience (Treisman, 2014, p. 513) regarding the different places she had lived, “I was happy but did not always feel that I belonged. I have had a similar experience as an adult in the United States.” In her scholarly endeavors she was just as global and multifaceted, first completing an undergraduate degree in Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University in 1956, only to request that the scholarship she had been awarded for postgraduate studies be reallocated to permit her to complete, a year later, a second undergraduate degree, this time in psychology. While at Cambridge, she was inspired by her supervisor Richard Gregory’s work on vision. Her first published work was on “Binocular Rivalry and Stereoscopic Depth Perception” (Treisman, 1962). For her doctoral work, she expanded her investigation into auditory perception and completed her doctoral degree in 1962 at Oxford University, under the tutelage of Carolus Oldfield, with a thesis titled “Selective Attention and Speech Perception.” The work from her dissertation showed that during auditory processing, a hierarchy is acted on selectively during attention. Anne’s first academic appointments were at the Medical Research Council’s Psycholinguistic Research Unit at Oxford and then as assistant professor in the Psychology Department, University of Oxford and fellow of St. Anne’s College, where she continued her work on auditory attention and speech perception. Her work while at Oxford centered on selective listening, from which came the first impactful theoretical contribution that put Anne into the textbooks, the filter attenuation theory (Treisman, 1964). Ann argued that, rather than filtering out unattended stimuli, as had been claimed by Donald Broadbent, the mind dampens down or attenuates these stimuli but does not eliminate them from consciousness. This early work focused on how attention can select perceptual input, allowing only potentially relevant information to reach consciousness and delineating both the limits of our attention and the costs of task switching. This theory provides a framework that still can account for why automobile accidents are on the rise or why social media may seem addictive, even as it is highly interruptive. In the late 1970s, Treismanmoved to a new faculty position at the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she conducted a slew of new experiments—now primarily in vision once again—forming the empirical basis of the seminal theory of visual object perception and attention, the feature integration theory (FIT). FIT is a two-stage model that describes the early stages of object perception as the parallel encoding of basic features—such as color, form, and orientation—as separate entities, instantly detectable. However, conscious perception of the object as a whole requires focused attention: Only with focused attention can one combine the * Karla K. Evans [e-mail]