Reference
Anne Treisman
Feature integration theory, the account of attention and binding behind the feature and conjunction search distinction, is hers with Garry Gelade.
In 1980 Treisman and Garry Gelade proposed that basic features such as colour and orientation are registered in parallel across the visual field, and that attention is needed to bind them into a single object. The search experiments in that paper became a standard demonstration: a target defined by one feature was found at much the same speed whatever the display size, while a target defined by a combination took longer with every added item.
The theory is often taught in that first form, which is unfair to her. By 1990, with Sato, she was writing that conjunctions of highly discriminable features can be searched rapidly or even in parallel, and proposing feature-based inhibition to account for it. She worked at Oxford, the University of British Columbia, Berkeley and Princeton, where she retired in 2010.
Referenced work
- A Feature-Integration Theory of Attention (Cognitive Psychology, 1980, with Garry Gelade) reference
- Conjunction Search Revisited (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1990, with S. Sato) reference
Elsewhere
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