Anne Treisman is one of the significant figures in the contemporary psychology. She is a cognitive psychologist who has been proposed influential theories about attentional systems. Currently, she is affiliated with Princeton University as an emeritus professor since 2010. Her research interests are now visual attention, object perception and memory.
Life and Career
She was born on 27th February, 1935 in Wakefield, Yorkshire as an older daughter of her family. Her father was English and her mother was French. Thus, she is bilingual and binational which made her sometimes feel not belonging fully to any culture even now in the USA although this background facilitated her adaptation to a new culture (Treisman, 2014). Her father who was an educator influenced her decisions on which topics she was going to study. Despite her preference on the sciences, her father changed her mind to French, Latin, and History during her high-school years because he did not want her child to be apart from any culture (Treisman, 2014). Consequently and again with her father’s directing, she began Cambridge University to study modern languages which took three years. After finishing her first undergraduate study, she wanted to study second undergraduate in psychology and requested Cambridge to use her opportunity of research fellowship offer for PhD in French Literature to study psychology (Treisman, 2014). Fortunately, Cambridge accepted this request and she began psychology route of her life.
Treisman achieved undergraduate degree in psychology in one year. Her tutor was Richard Gregory who had much influence on her interests and her perspective to psychology (see next section). Although she was thinking on being a clinical psychologist, Gregory in...
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Stephen Correia is a psychologist in the state of Rhode Island. He started his education at Manhattenville College in Purchase, NY, but transferred after a year to University of Rhode Island. He graduated from University of Rhode Island in 1982 with an undergraduate Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Twelve years later he continued his education going back to University of Rhode Island. This time he was going for his graduate degree in Psychology. He graduated four years later with a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology. Right after, he pursued his Doctor of Philosophy degree continuing at University of Rhode Island. He graduated in 2001 for the third time from the University of Rhode Island with a Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology.
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Prior knowledge plays a pivotal role in every aspect of human life. Knowledge can be stored in various formats like images, features, statistical patterns, all these formats help in making sense of the environment. Using prior knowledge humans can perform various activities including, but not limited to: focusing attention, organizing information in to groups, categorizing objects around, hypothesizing, understanding language, and generating inferences(Smith & Kosslyn, 2007). Processing of information is influenced by prior knowledge during the top down processing. Once signal has been detected by the biological visual system, we try to infer meaning using the prior related knowledge which has been stored in the long term memory based on category, association and similarity in features and statistical patterns(Wickens, Lee, Liu, & Becker, 2004). Prior knowledge has no boundaries and it keeps on changing based on experience with the environment making it easier for us humans to understand our surrounding better and quicker as time passes.
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Sensory memory provides the ability to truly experience photograpical skills, enabling one’s self to focus on the details from the image (Sperling, G., 1960). However, seconds later, short-term memory can only recover few details from the image (Phillips, W. A., 1974). Days later, it may even be difficult to recall the whole image, so the brain may only recall the gist of the image (Brainerd C.J., Reyna V.F., 2005). According to a research from the book “To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in