ANNE TREISMAN (1935-2018), was one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the world. She was the Emeritus James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, where she taught beginning in 1993. 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 defined 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 often challenged investigators to think outside the box, to reach beyond their own specialties and to address the hard questions of human cognition.
Her research interests included 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.
She had been recognised by election to the Royal Society in 1989, the National Academy of Sciences in the USA in 1994, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1995. Anne Treisman was the first psychologist to win the Golden Brain Award, in 1996. She was the recipient of the 2009 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Psychology for her theory of how the brain builds meaningful images from the bits of information.
Dr. Treisman was married to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.