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York Honours Professor Anne Treisman

Posted on 17 July 2014

World-leading scientist returns to her Yorkshire roots.

We’re delighted that the University of York will be honouring Professor Anne Treisman as part of our graduation celebrations on Friday 18th July. Professor Treisman is one of the world’s most prominent psychologists, known for her research on visual attention, object perception and memory.

She has been a pioneer in studying how attention acts to select inputs for brain processing, how this process of selective attention is controlled, and its key role in constructing perceptual representations of objects. Her creative and insightful work has inspired a whole school of experimentation and theoretical analysis leading to over 10,000 citations in the scientific literature.

In 2013, President Obama awarded her USA’s highest honour for science, the National Medal of Science. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. Among her awards is the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Society. Having worked at the University of Oxford, the University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University, it’s less well-known that she was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. It is exciting that she is able to return to Yorkshire for our graduation ceremony on Friday, where she will receive an honorary doctorate. The Psychology department will also be hosting an afternoon of academic talks in Professor Treisman’s honour.