Textbook of Usability

1935 to 2018, United Kingdom and USA · Princeton psychologist; pioneer of attention research

Also known as: Anne M. Treisman

Anne Marie Treisman spent her career at Oxford, the University of British Columbia and Princeton, and produced the most influential single theory of visual attention. Her 1980 paper with Garry Gelade, A Feature-Integration Theory of Attention, distinguished pre-attentive processing (rapid, parallel, unconscious detection of basic features such as colour, orientation and motion) from attentive processing (slow, serial, conscious binding of features into objects). The distinction explains the visual "pop-out" of a red item among green ones, and the slow search required when targets and distractors share features.

Treisman's framework underpins the design of preattentive visualisations, where critical alerts and signals are encoded in features the visual system processes in parallel and so cannot readily miss. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2011.