FROM PERCEP T ION TO CONSCIOUSN E SS Oxford Series in Visual Cognition Series Editors Gillian Rhodes Mary A. Peterson Perception of Faces, Objects, and Scenes: Analytic and Holistic Processes Edited by Mary A. Peterson and Gillian Rhodes Fitting the Mind to the World: Adaptation and Aft er-Eff ects in High-Level Vision Edited by Colin W.G. Clifford and Gillian Rhodes Human Body Perception from the Inside Out Edited by Günther Knoblich, Ian M. Thornton, March Grosjean, and Maggie Shifrar Understanding Events: From Perception to Action Edited by Thomas F. Shipley and Jeffrey M. Zacks Visual Memory Edited by Steven J. Luck and Andrew Hollingworth Perceptual Expertise: Bridging Brain and Behavior Edited by Isabel Gauthier, Michael J. Tarr, and Daniel Bub Th e Science of Social Vision Edited by Reginald B. Adams, Nalini Ambady, Ken Nakayama, and Shinsuke Shimojo From Perception to Consciousness: Searching with Anne Treisman Edited by Jeremy Wolfe and Lynn Robertson FROM PERCEPTION TO CONSCIOUSNESS SEARCHING WITH ANNE TREISMAN EDITED BY EDITED BY Jeremy Wolfe Lynn Robertson 1 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data From perception to consciousness : searching with Anne Treisman/edited by Jeremy Wolfe, Lynn Robertson. p. cm.—(Oxford series in visual cognition) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–973433–7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Perception. 2. Consciousness. 3. Treisman, Anne. I. Wolfe, Jeremy M. II. Robertson, Lynn C. BF311.F76 2012 153.7—dc23 2011036765 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper PREFACE Th ose who pick up this book, thumb through it, and, we hope, within and outside psychology, with some 3,600 citations all contemplate reading it, probably know that Anne Treisman by itself. FIT raised to prominence the idea that early vision has been a giant in the study of perception, attention, and encodes separate features preattentively in diff erent “feature memory. However, not many readers may know the whole maps” and that attention was required to “bind” these fea- story. Given our lamentable tendency to read only the last few tures into perceptually coherent objects (see Wolfe, Cave, and years of the literature, this will be especially true for readers Egeth commentaries, chapters 5, 6, and 7, respectively). She who have entered the fi eld fairly recently. In this volume, our went on to show that without this spatially focused attention, approach has been to reprint a selection of Treisman’s most these features could be bound inaccurately to form “illusory important papers from the past 50(!) years, accompanied conjunctions” of, for example, the color of one item and the by new commentaries by authors whose research and think- form of another (see Prinzmetal commentary, chapter 9). ing has been infl uenced by those papers. Taken together, the Later work, motivated by FIT, addressed an impressive range chapters in this volume show the depth, breadth, and reach of issues in perception including: fi gure-ground segmenta- of Treisman’s theoretical and empirical work. As one measure tion (see Peterson; Pomerantz and Portillo commentaries, of that reach, the papers reprinted here from peer-reviewed chapters 11 and 8, respectively), perceptual learning (see journals have been cited about 9,000 times. Chun commentary, chapter 10), spatial and object vision Anne’s creativity and ingenuity was notable from the (see Humphreys and Riddoch and Robertson commentaries, beginning. While still a young graduate student, her curiosity chapter 15 and 14, respectively), scene analysis (see Evans and about unperceived visual percepts was refl ected in a study of Chong; Haberman and Whitney commentaries, chapters 13 sound fi ltering and attention to one stream or another that and 16, respectively), and implicit and explicit memory (see was published in 1960 (see Cowen Commentary, chapter 2). Higgins and Johnson; Zhang, Johnson, Woodman, and Luck In vision, she addressed similar questions in a study of bin- commentaries, chapters 18 and 17, respectively). ocular rivalry, published in 1962 (see Blake commentary, Th e impact of Treisman’s work on the emergence of cogni- chapter 4). Th us, from the beginning, her interests focused on tive neurosciences is also evident in this volume (see especially unconsciously processed sensory information and how selec- the Hochstein commentary). Her work has spurred a wealth tion aff ected what was seen and heard and what was not. of imaging, electrophysiological, and neuropsychological As noted in the introduction by Glucksberg, Treisman’s studies of the relationship between perception and memory, graduate dissertation in 1962 focused on the question of and these are discussed in several of the commentaries in the whether attentional fi lters acted early (toward encoding) or present volume. Th roughout her career, Treisman introduced later (toward response) in the processing of stimuli. She sug- creative methods and innovative solutions for some of the gested that it could be a bit of both, depending on the task most challenging questions in psychology, including how the (see Lavie commentary, chapter 3). A few years later Anne brain selects information for conscious awareness and how published a seminal review of the attention literature in information that is encoded in bits and pieces can be inte- Psychological Review that was central to the development of grated to form the unifi ed world we experience. Th e entries the scientifi c study of selection and attention (see Duncan in this volume refl ect this quest and illustrate the diversity of commentary, chapter 1). Th is paper articulated many of the ideas and experiments that she helped motivate. basic issues that continue to be fundamental in the fi eld. Aft er a few years and a great many new experiments, Treisman pro- Lynn Robertson posed her enormously infl uential Feature-Integration Th eory Jeremy Wolfe (FIT) (1980), which has continued to have broad impact both February, 2011 v This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Anne Treisman was born in 1935 in Yorkshire, England. She look at a red ball rolling on the fl oor, we do not see redness, was interested in science early on, but at her father’s wish roundness, and motion as separate percepts. Instead, we see a that she become a cultured person, she switched to French, moving red ball. How is this accomplished? Anne proposed Latin, and History for her last three years of high school. that there is a “spotlight” of attention that serially moves Upon receiving a B.A. in Modern and Medieval languages at around in the representations of space in the brain, perhaps as Cambridge, she was off ered a Research Fellowship to work for oft en as 25/sec. Th e features of an object are bound together a doctoral degree in French literature. Th is time she decided when the spotlight of attention lands on the location of that to follow her interest in science and used the fellowship funds object. In a sense, this suggests that we need to know where (with permission) to obtain a one-year undergraduate degree an object is before we can know what it is —that is, before its in Psychology instead. She obtained her PhD from Oxford features are bound together in 1962, where her thesis, “Selective Attention and Speech Th is idea is quite counterintuitive. People are not aware of Perception,” presaged her subsequent major contributions to either the serial scan, or of the binding process. Anne’s genius our understanding of attention and perception. in examining this idea was in developing striking predictions Anne joined the Princeton faculty in 1993, following of her feature integration theory (FIT) and testing those pre- university appointments at Oxford University, University dictions empirically. One such prediction is that one process of British Columbia, and University of California, Berkeley. is involved in detecting that a particular feature is present Her academic honors include election as a Fellow of the somewhere in a visual scene (e.g., there is something red in Royal Society, London (1989), Warren medal of the Society the scene), and a diff erent process in detecting a conjunction of Experimental Psychologists (1990), National Academy of of features (e.g., there is a red X on the left side of a scene). Key Sciences (1994), American Academy of Arts and Sciences evidence for this prediction came from the results of visual (1995), honorary degrees from University of British Columbia search tasks. People are asked to look for a target item among and University College London (2004, 2006), American some number of other items. Th e time to fi nd a target defi ned Philosophical Society (2005), and the Grawemeyer award by a single basic feature (e.g., a red target among green dis- in Psychology (2009, an award that recognizes outstanding tractors) was independent of the number of distractor items. ideas in psychology). Her work has appeared in 29 book chap- Th is implicates a parallel-search process. If a target was not ters and more than 80 journal articles, and her work is heav- distinguished by a single basic feature (e.g., a letter among ily cited in the psychological literature, as well as prominently various other letters), then the time required to fi nd the tar- included in both introductory and advanced textbooks. get increased as a linear function of the number of distract- Her early work focused on how attention can fi lter per- ing items, suggesting a serial process of binding one item at ceptual input, allowing only potentially relevant informa- a time. tion to reach consciousness. Th e dominant theory at the time Th e theory predicted a phenomenon heretofore not postulated a general, nonselective fi ltering mechanism. Anne observed: the phenomenon of illusory conjunctions. When used a selective listening paradigm to see what kinds of infor- people cannot focus their attention, people may misperceive mation get through the general fi lter. People wore earphones objects by combining features from other objects (e.g., see a and were instructed to attend to only one ear. Messages in the red T when the actual objects are a red O and a blue T). It’s attended ear were understood and remembered, those in the oft en been said that there is nothing as practical as a good unattended ear were fi ltered out—they were neither noticed theory, and in Anne’s case her feature integration theory nor remembered. However, potentially important informa- was good indeed. Th e theory helped to explain a puzzling tion, such as mention of one’s name in the unattended ear, is symptom in patients with parietal lobe damage, known as instantly noticed, demonstrating that the attentional fi lter is Balints’ patients. Th ese people have lost their ability to local- selective. ize objects visually. According to FIT, if an object cannot be In the 1970s her research interests turned from audition localized, then the selective attention cannot be deployed to to vision, and to the feature- integration, or binding, problem. that object, making binding of features diffi cult if not impos- Anne began with two observations: (1) Perceptual features, sible. Anne found that these patients had a major binding such as shape, color, and motion, are processed by diff erent problem. Even when presented with just two objects, say a red subsystems of the brain; (2) nonetheless, we experience multi- X and a blue T, the patients would oft en see a blue X or a red featured objects as integrated wholes. For example, when we T, even if they were given unrestricted observation time to vii make their j udgments. Th is result was a striking confi rmation cited paper in the last 12 years in the main cognitive psychol- of the counterintuitive notion that we need to know where ogy journals. Her papers on attention have been cited more an object is to know what it is—that is, we need to know than 13,800 times. Her theory was instrumental in bringing what features must be bound together. Because these patients together the behavioral phenomena of focused and global could not attend selectively to diff erent object locations, they attention with what neuroscientists have discovered about the display simultanagnosia (their inability to see more than one functions of the various pathways involved in representing object at a time). locations and actions. Her work has been used by applied psy- Th e theory also raises important questions. For example, chologists who work to improve the discriminability of such if people must bind objects one at a time, how can we have things as railway and traffi c signals, and the search for weap- immediate impressions of the detailed scenes that we encoun- ons by baggage inspectors in airports. With luck, the people ter on a daily basis? Anne contrasted the operation of binding who design training regimens for airport security personnel in order to individuate objects with a diff erent mode of atten- may well be able to use her work to speed up the process with- tional deployment that processes sets of similar objects (e.g., a out loss of accuracy. fl ock of geese) and even whole scenes. Th ese latter attentional Rounding out this brief summary of Anne’s career, her processes provide information about the global properties of contributions extend to her training of graduate and under- scenes, general spatial layouts, and gists of scenes, without the graduate students, her unstinting participation in both journal need to bind features of individual objects. Together, focused and book reviewing, in grant-review processes, and in univer- and global attention allow people to combine accurate iden- sity service. Binding all her features together, we enjoyed the tifi cation of a few objects with quick apprehension of the gist friendship and collegiality of a complete academic. of a scene. Th e impact of Anne’s work on theory and practice has Sam Glucksberg been enormous. Her original 1980 paper on FIT is the most Princeton, 2008 viii • INTRODUCTION CONTENTS Contributors xi Article: Treisman, A., & Paterson, R. (1984). Emergent features, attention and object perception, Journal Article: Treisman, A. (1969 ). Strategies and models of of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and selective attention. Psychological Review, 76(3), 282–299. 1 Performance, 10, 12–21. 172 1. A research agenda for 40 years and counting: Strategies 8. Emergent Features, Gestalts, and Feature and models of selective attention (1969) 13 Integration Th eory 187 John Duncan James R. Pomerantz and Mary C. Portillo Article: Treisman, A. (1960). Contextual cues in selective Article: Treisman, A., & Schmidt, H. (1982). Illusory listening. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, conjunctions in the perception of objects. Cognitive 12, 242–248. 20 Psychology., 14, 107–141. 193 Article: Treisman, A., & Davies, A. (1973). Divided 9. At the Core of Feature Integration Th eory: attention to ear and eye. In S. Kornblum (Ed.) On Treisman and Schmidt (1982) 211 Attention and Performance IV, Academic Press, 101–117. 24 William Prinzmetal 2. Focused and Divided Attention to the Eyes and Ears: A Research Journey 32 Article: Treisman, A., Vieira, A., & Hayes, A. (1992). Nelson Cowan Automaticity and preattentive processing. American Journal of Psychology, 105, 341–362. 218 Article: Treisman, A. and Geff en, G. (1967). Selective 10. Perceptual Learning and Memory in Visual Search 227 attention: perception or response? Quarterly Journal Marvin M. Chun of Experimental Psychology 19(1): 1–17. 40 3. From the Mother Lode to Load 51 Article: Treisman, A. & DeSchepper, B. 1996. Nilli Lavie Object tokens, attention, and visual memory. In T. Inui and J. McClelland (Eds.) Attention and Article: Treisman, A. (1962). Binocular rivalry and Performance XVI: Information Integration in stereoscopic depth perception. Quarterly Journal of Perception and Communication, Cambridge, MA: Experimental Psychology, 14, 23–37. 59 MIT Press, 15–46. 237 4. Binocular Rivalry and Stereopsis Revisited 69 Randolph Blake 11. Plasticity, Competition, and Task Eff ects in Object Perception 253 Article: Treisman, A., & Gelade, G. (1980). A feature- Mary A. Peterson integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology, 12, 97–136. 77 Article: Treisman, A. 2006. How the deployment of 5. Establishing the fi eld: Treisman and Gelade (1980) 97 attention determines what we see. Visual Cognition, Jeremy M. Wolfe 14, 411–443. 263 12. Reciprocal Eff ects of Attention and Perception: Article: Treisman, A., & Gormican, S. (1988). Feature On Anne Treisman’s “How the Deployment analysis in early vision: Evidence from search of Attention Determines What We See” 278 asymmetries. Psychological Review, 95, 15–48. 104 Shaul Hochstein 6. FIT: Foundation for an Integrative Th eory 139 Kyle R. Cave 13. Distributed Attention and Its Implication For Visual Perception 288 Article: Treisman, A. (1988). Features and objects: Th e Karla K. Evans and Sang Chul Chong Fourteenth Bartlett Memorial Lecture. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A (2) 201–237. 147 Article: Robertson, L. Treisman, A., Friedman-Hill, S., & 7. Some Refl ections on the Processing of Grabowecky, M. (1997). Th e interaction of spatial and Perceptual Features 164 object pathways: Evidence from Balint’s syndrome. Howard E. Egeth Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 295–3. 297 ix