From Perception To Consciousness: Searching With Anne Treisman (Advances In Visual Cognition)

From Perception to Consciousness: Searching with Anne Treisman (Advances in Visual Cognition)

Review"In summary, From Perception to Consciousness offers insight into the progressionand emergence of research topics within the study of attention and other related areas, asillustrated through a theoretically driven framework consisting of Treisman's publishedworks. It ties together several areas of research in a way that is not frequently seen, and italso describes the current state of these areas and their contemporary findings. Moreover, the readings demonstrate ideal research skills, such as considering new results, revising theories and ideas, and contemplating theoretical perspectives beyond a small subset of studies... For these reasons, this book is appropriate for anyone interested in studying the basic research informing the understanding of perception and consciousness." -- Lauren N. Hecht, PsycCRITIQUESAnyone interested in the study of attention will have had some exposure to the work of Anne Treisman. Anne Treisman has been one of the most influential cognitive psychologists in the last 50 years. Her research and theoretical insights have influenced a variety of disciplines, including vision sciences, auditory sciences, cognitive psychology, cognitive neurosciences, philosophy, psychiatry, neuropsychology, and behavioral neurology. She is best known for her work on attention. Early in her career, much of that work involved auditory stimuli. Her later work has been primarily in the realm of visual attention. She has been especially concerned with the interactions among visual perception, attention, and memory as they relate to conscious and unconscious experience. Her Feature Integration Theory has been one of the organizing ideas in the field for three decades.While still a graduate student at Oxford, she helped launch the modern study of attention. In the present volume, several of her most influential papers are reprinted (including some of the harder to find early work). To accompany these reprints, the editors invited experts to comment and/or to show how their own work had been shaped by Treisman's ideas and findings. The result is a scientifically rich ride through the world of ideas inspired by Treisman's work. The contributed chapters include discussions of auditory and visual attention, the role of features in selection, parallel and serial processing, and automaticity. They describe the roots and evolution of Feature Integration Theory and related models like Guided Search. They explore the interactions of attention and perception at the cognitive, neuropsychological, and biological levels. Readers can consider the critical role of binding in perception, the role of attention in scene perception, as well as the influence ofcognitive load, memory, reflection, and perceptual learning on early and late processing. They will see how methods to study conscious perceptual awareness have evolved over the years.About the AuthorJeremy Wolfe, Professor of Ophthalmology and Radiology, Harvard Medical School, and Director of Visual Attention Lab, Brigham & Women's HospitalLynn Robertson, Senior Research Scientist, Veterans Administration and Professor, University of California, Berkeley, Berkley, CA