In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention.
[1] 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.
[2] Two years later, her family moved to a village near Rochester, Kent[3] where her father, Percy Taylor, worked as chief education officer during World War II.
During this extra year, Treisman studied under the supervision of Richard Gregory, who introduced her to various methods of exploring the mind through experiments in perception.
[7] In 1957, Treisman attended Somerville College, Oxford, to work toward her DPhil under her advisor, Carolus Oldfield.
[6][9] 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.
[10] Donald Broadbent and Colin Cherry had recently introduced the idea of selective listening (often exemplified by the so-called "cocktail party effect")[11] 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.
Treisman used a dichotic listening task during which participants heard multiple languages and different voices (male vs. female).
[13] 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.
Treisman moved to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986, where she and Kahneman ran a joint "Attention Lab" in the Psychology Department.
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.
Treisman's feature integration theory is a two-stage model of visual object perception: The first stage is called "pre-attentive" because it happens automatically, or without effort or attention by the perceiver.
Treisman posits we are unaware of this stage of attention because it occurs quickly and early in perceptual processes (before conscious awareness).
[19] William James discussed the connection between attention and mental processes, "Millions of items…are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience.
"[16] In the early 1980s, neuroscientists such as Torsten Wiesel 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.
[19] Treisman also cited corroborating evidence from positron emission tomography and event-related potential studies which were consistent with the spatial attention account of feature integration.
Treisman was the recipient of the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for her explanation of how our brains build meaningful images from what we see.
[25] In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her pioneering work in the study of attention.