[visionlist] Anne Treisman

[Nancy Kanwisher]

I think much of the outpouring about Anne has happened on other lists but should be resent to the vision lists; I am resending below the brief tribute I wrote for another list.

For those of you grieving and missing Anne I recommend the brief video here, which is just quintessential Anne in the lucidity and depth of her explanation, her humility, and her charming joy in the ideas: https://behavioralpolicy.princeton.edu/news/anne-treisman-1935-2018

From: Nancy Kanwisher <ngk at .mit.edu<http://mit.edu>>
Subject: Anne Treisman
Date: February 11, 2018 at 1:46:52 PM EST
To: sep_forum at sepsych.org<mailto:sep_forum at sepsych.org>
The two enormous, defining privileges of my academic upbringing were the opportunities to work with Molly Potter as a grad student and Anne Triesman as a postdoc.
Talk about role models; Wow!
Anne was a huge inspiration to me, indeed to all the cognitive psychologists of my generation.
As this group will know, she is responsible for an astonishing number of the foundational discoveries and ideas in our field.
But she was also a generous and kind person.
To enable me to come to Berkeley, Anne battled extensively with the campus bureaucracy so that I could bring my own grant (something the system was not set up to allow), she found space for me when her own lab was itself tiny, and she did all of this before we had even met, and despite the fact that I had yet to even publish a  paper.
Anne also had a wry sense of humor that was all the more delightful coming from this otherwise reserved and gracious giant of the field.
I remember us “kids” in the lab worrying about the latest attack on feature integration theory, and Anne just responding with a mischeivous grin and a sparkle in her eye, saying: “Here we go again!”.
I remember a star-struck graduate student approaching her at a conference and telling her about their obscure psychophysical finding, and Anne saying: “What would you like, my blessing?”
I remember her reporting that when she first moved to California, and one of the very Californian psychologists at Stanford asked her “What do you do for your body?”, she replied “I feed it!”.
What a huge loss for many of us personally, and for our field.
Nancy

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