ANNE TREISMAN HONORED WITH NATIONAL MEDAL OF SCIENCE

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ANNE TREISMAN HONORED WITH NATIONAL MEDAL OF SCIENCE

Anne Treisman [2.19.13]

President Barack Obama awards the National Medal of Science to psychologist Anne Treisman in a ceremony at the White House on February 1, 2013 in Washington, DC.  

COMMENTS: Steven Pinker, Michael Gazzaniga, Michael Goldberg & Eric Kandel

ANNE TREISMAN, the Eremitus James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, where she  taught beginning in 1993 is one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the world today.  In recognition of her achievements, she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in a white House ceremony in January, 2013.  

For over 40 years she has been defining fundamental issues of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects and memories that guide human thought and action. Her creativity and insight have often challenged investigators to think outside the box, to reach beyond their own specialties and to address the hard questions of human cognition. Her current research interests include visual perception of objects and the role of attention, integration of information in perception of moving and changing objects, perceptual learning, visual memory for objects and events, and the coding of shape and motion.

Dr. Treisman is married to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.

 

 
VIDEOS AT NSF

"Psychologist Anne Treisman, 2011 National Medical of Science Laureate proposed revolutionary ideas that had an enormous impact inside and outside of psychology, including the Feature Integration Theory of attention, which inspired thousands of experiments in cognitive psychology, vision sciences, cognitive science, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience."

 

What Are You Most Proud Of In Your Career?
I suppose I'm best known for trying to understand how attention shapes the world of perception: what we see, what we become consciously aware of, and what things we don't become aware of but still the brain registers. I'm interested in how consciousness is created from the sensory data that reach our eyes and ears.

What Has Encourages You The Most In Your Field?
The thing that was most fun was that I came up before the neuroscientists discovered the fact that the brain seems to be fairly specialized for different processes in different areas. I came up with that notion separately and asked the question how we put those different aspects together again to form the kind of integrated world that we experience. How do we see that the skirt is red and the blouse is blue, for example, rather than other way around?

What Advice Would You Give To The Next Generation Of Scientists?
For me what has always been fun is the excitement of the new ideas, so let your imagination go and shake it out if you can. Think of ways of bringing it down to earth so that you can actually test it and that’s what my students have been doing and in fact succeeding at mainly.

ANNE TREISMAN, the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1993, is one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the world today. For over 40 years she has been defining fundamental issues of how information is selected and integrated to form meaningful objects and memories that guide human thought and action. Dr. Treisman lives in New York City and is married to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics. 

Anne Treisman's Edge Bio Page

Reality Club Discussion

steven_pinker's picture
Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality

There are many kinds of scientific genius­­­—mathematical prowess, technological virtuosity, a naturalist’s keen eye —but perhaps the most impressive is the gift of illuminating a deep phenomenon with a simple and elegant demonstration. Anne Treisman’s experiments on visual search and illusory conjunctions are so low-tech they can be carried out in an intro-psych lecture, so robust that they elicit audible gasps from the students, and so profound that they help explain major features of perception, attention, cognition, neuroanatomy, and consciousness. Psychologists everywhere share in rejoicing over this well-deserved honor.

michael_gazzaniga's picture
Michael Gazzaniga
Neuroscientist, UC Santa Barbara; Author, The Consciousness Instinct

If there ever was a paper that launched a thousand ships, it was Anne Treisman's paper with her student Gelade in 1980. With over 6000 citations the paper laid the groundwork for her Feature Integration Theory, the idea that while the brain seemed to automatically divide up aspects of objects into color, shape, motion and so on, it also had to glue them back together in way that we obviously experience as unitary wholes. How does it do that? It was about that time when lots of us were talking about the idea of cognitive neuroscience, the notion that perceptual and cognitive processes could be broken down into component parts and those processes could then be localized in the brain for neuroscientific analysis. Talk is cheap. Treisman actually laid out a careful example on how that might all work. It was this work that gave credibility to the very idea of a cognitive neuroscience. Treisman set an unparalleled standard.

michael_goldberg's picture
Michael Goldberg
David Mahoney Professor of Brain and Behavior; Director, Mahoney–Keck Center for Brain and Behavior Research, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
eric_r_kandel's picture
Eric R. Kandel
Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2002; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University; Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

The angels rejoiced when they heard that Anne Treisman was recognized with the National Medal of Science. To appreciate her contributions we place her work into the historical context from which it derives.

The last three decades of the 20th century saw a merger of neuroscience, the science of the brain and cognitive psychology, the science of the mind, to give rise to a new science of mind. One area in which this merger was most successful was the area of hearing and vision. A major reason for this success was Anne Treisman's seminal and groundbreaking contributions to cognitive psychology, which opened up our understanding of attention and feature binding (i.e. the integration of different visual elements). Although Anne Treisman has worked exclusively with human subjects, her work facilitated in powerful ways the emergence of The New Science of Mind. Indeed, she was one of the few cognitive psychologists, who did not treat the brain as a black box, but instead relied on our knowledge of the physiological processes underlying vision and attention to inform her experiments and thought.

Treisman's salient work in the field began with her dissertation in 1964, in which she found that there was a hierarchy in auditory information which could be filtered out by attention: it is easier to filter out voices of different pitches than voices of similar pitches speaking dissimilar semantic streams. This work (Treisman 1964; Treisman 1964) is still cited today, nearly fifty years later (Mounts 2012).

The importance of different levels of filtering led to her study of visual search, in which she discovered that visual search behaved as if there were two different strategies. One is efficient search (or parallel or preattentive search) in which a single object is easy to find by virtue of a salient physical property, for example a red T in a field of black L's. The object can be found quickly and reaction time is unaffected by the number of distractors. The other is inefficient search (or serial search), for example a capital T in a field of lower case t distractors, some of which have the same color as the capital T, while others have different colors. Each of the objects in this array must be attended to and examined serially until the target is found. As a result, the reaction time of the search increases linearly with the number of distractors (Treisman and Gelade 1980).

Treisman again captured the attention of the neural science community when she discovered the relationship between attention and the binding problem, the question of how the brain links together different perceptual features, which are processed separately in the early visual system, to create a perceptual unity. This was particularly central to the thinking of brain scientists because it coincided with Hubel and Wiesel's discovery of linear receptive fields in primary visual cortex, which raised the issue of how the contours of an object are bound together. In her words, "The world that we effortlessly-and usually accurately—perceive consists of complex objects that are characterized by their shapes, colors, movements, and other properties. To identify an object, we must specify not only its parts and properties, but also how those parts and properties are combined. What mechanisms ensure that we normally see the correct conjunctions, for example, a blue shirt as blue, with gray pants as gray, and not the reverse? (Treisman 1996)

In her feature integration theory spatial attention "the spotlight of attention" links feature maps to facilitate binding. Binding is not automatic: normal humans make mistakes. When objects of different shapes and colors are presented rapidly, for example a red T and a green L subjects will occasionally see a green T instead—an 'illusory conjunction.' Forcing subjects to attend to other objects in the field increases the frequency of illusory conjunctions, when the subjects are then asked to describe unattended objects(Treisman 1998).

Patients with deficits in the parietal lobe, the part of the cortex assumed to be most important in the processes underlying visual attention, make far more illusory conjunctions than normal subjects, as if the attentional deficit were to cause a deficit in binding(Friedman-Hill, Robertson et al. 1995). Thus, by unifying the processes of attention and binding, Anne Treisman has illustrated how the physiological separation of the analysis of different features and of attention is mirrored in the psychological performance of normal humans and patients—a beautiful example that helped launch the new science of mind.

Friedman-Hill, S., L. Robertson, et al. (1995). "Parietal contributions to visual feature binding: evidence from a patient with bilateral lesions." Science (New York, N.Y.) 269(5225): 853-855.

Mounts, J. (2012). "From classic to current: a look back on attention research in the American Journal of Psychology." The American journal of psychology 125(4): 423-434.

Treisman, A. (1964). The effect of irrelevant material on the selectivity of listening .The American journal of psychology 77: 533-546.

Treisman, A. (1964). Verbal cues, language, and meaning in selective attention. The American journal of psychology 77: 206-219.

Treisman, A. (1996). The binding problem. Curr. opin. neurobiol. 6: 171-178.

Treisman, A. (1998). Feature binding, attention and object perception. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 353(1373): 1295-1306.

Treisman, A. and G. Gelade (1980). A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12(1): 97-136.