“She pioneered the study of attention in cognitive psychology, recognizing early on that attention is the key to understanding how people make sense of the world around them,” psychology department chair Deborah Prentice said in an e-mail. “Everyone knows that now, but that’s in large part because of Anne’s work.”
FIT is “a theory of how our minds deploy attentional resources in ways that enable us to perceive objects as coherent wholes,” Prentice explained.
Treisman is the second University faculty member to earn the $200,000 award. Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to Prospect Theory, earned the Grawemeyer Award in 2003 with his colleague, the late Amos Tversky, for their work revolutionizing a scientific approach to decision making. Kahneman is also Treisman’s husband.
Prentice said Treisman’s experiments are both remarkably clever and well-designed. “Her theories are insightful and stand the test of time,” Prentice noted.
The award selection committee cited the endurance and pervasiveness of her theory and its role in inspiring a wide range of study as the reasons for her selection, according to the Grawemeyer Award’s website.
Developed in 1980, FIT is still used by scientists trying to sharpen airport baggage inspectors’ detection capabilities, help educators design classes that strike a balance between sensory deprivation and overload, and help develop pills that are easy to tell apart, said Woody Petry, a University of Louisville professor of brain sciences and psychology who chairs the selection committee.
“Her theory explains why we see a red sports car driving by instead of an assortment of different features such as the color red, a shape in motion and so on,” Petry explained.
FIT has also been used by scientists investigating psychological disorders, such as Balint’s syndrome, a condition in which individuals have difficulty identifying more than one object at a time.
Prentice attributes the University’s prowess in cognitive neuroscience to Treisman’s efforts.
“Anne recognized early on how important neuroimaging was going to become to the study of cognitive processes like attention, and has done a great deal to foster the development of the field of cognitive neuroscience,” Prentice said. “Princeton’s Psychology Department is a world leader in that field, largely because Anne and one or two others convinced us that we should invest in it when it was still very new and controversial.”
Treisman, a British and U.S. citizen who earned her D.Phil. from Oxford University, came to Princeton in 1993 after serving on the faculties of UC Berkeley, the University of British Columbia and Oxford.
Among her accolades are the Minerva Foundation’s Golden Brain award and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s George Miller Award, which she won earlier this year. In addition to being an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, Treisman is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Royal Society of London.
A brilliant scholar and a “first-rate scientist,” Treisman is also “a wonderful colleague and mentor to graduate students, post-docs and junior faculty,” Prentice said.
Julia Bognon ’95 said that Treisman had a profound influence on her experience at the University, particularly on the direction of her thesis, which Treisman advised.
“I took more courses on the social psychology side, and she was more on the cognitive side,” Bognon explained. “I ended up doing a thesis in a more cognitive direction, and she guided me through the process and was terrific the whole way through.”
Mark Rogerson ’04, whose thesis Treisman also advised, praised Treisman’s mentorship.
“She provided warm guidance and sage advice throughout my senior year and beyond,” he said in an e-mail.
“She deserves every bit of recognition,” Bognon added, offering her congratulations.
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