Anne Treisman was a cognitive psychologist who studied how our attention — the process of selectively concentrating on a particular aspect of information — shapes our perception of the world. She was best known for her feature integration theory of attention, along with the development of many of the experimental methods that underpin visual research to this day.
The feature integration theory proposes that our brain breaks down our surroundings into a series of features — such as colour, size or motion — that are processed individually, with attention acting to bind these features into a cohesive whole.
Anne received many honours in recognition of her work, including the 1996 Golden Brain Award of the Minerva Foundation and the US National Medal of Science in 2013. She was elected as a Fellow of the US Association for Psychological Science, and a Member of both the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Professor Anne Treisman FRS died on 9 February 2018.
Biographical Memoir
