Anne Treisman

Anne Treisman (1935 to 2018) was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology and studied visual attention, object perception and memory. Born in Wakefield and educated at Cambridge and Oxford, she completed her doctorate at Oxford in 1961 with a thesis on attention and speech. In 1964 she proposed attenuation theory, which modified Donald Broadbent's filter model by holding that unattended information is weakened rather than blocked completely. With Garry Gelade she published feature integration theory in 1980, which says that early perception encodes features such as color, form and orientation separately and that focused attention binds them into objects. She taught at Oxford, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton, and in 2013 she received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama.