From Perception to Consciousness: Searching with Anne Treisman

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 of cognitive 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.