1968

Anne was a former member of our department (1957-1978), where she obtained her DPhil in 1962 and then worked as a research fellow and subsequently University Lecturer. She was a fellow of St Anne’s College. The Department were lucky to see her back at Oxford to host the inaugural Anne Treisman lecture in October 2012. 

Professor Treisman was a luminary in attention research, contributing significantly to the theoretical foundations of the field as we know it today. She introduced Attenuation Theory, which added much needed flexibility into selection of information based on both physical features and meaningful learned associations; she developed the Feature Integration Theory to explain when and how the attention focus operates to deliver objects to our perception; she proposed that objects could also act as units of selection; and much more.

Her work has formed the basis for thousands of subsequent experiments in vision, cognitive and neurological sciences, and has informed many improvements to real-life systems such as traffic signal design and airport baggage inspection. Honours for her research included an election to the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she received the National Medal of Science from President Barack Obama for her research into attention and perception.