Treisman (1963): An Appreciation

What is it about?

This article discusses the content of Michel Treisman’s 1963 monograph presenting a “model of the time keeping mechanism”. Data from the seven experiments reported in the monograph are first discussed, then an attempt is made to explain the structure and operation of the model in some detail. Next, the model’s explanations of several important results found in Treisman’s experiments are presented. One is conformity of data to what Treisman called the “Weber function”, a generalized version of Weber’s Law. The second is conformity of data to Vierordt’s Law, the idea that when a range of time intervals is presented, short values tend to be overestimated and long ones underestimated. Finally, there was the phenomenon that Treisman called “lengthening”, the finding that responses on reproduction and production tasks tended to become longer as the experiment proceeded. Later sections briefly discusses potential relations between Treisman’s work and scalar expectancy theory (SET) proposed twenty years later, and also discusses how modern treatments of some of the issues that Treisman discussed are similar or different from the ones he proposed in 1963.

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