Professor of Experimental Psychology, principal investigator in PRG1151 grant „Pre-attentive Information Processing in the Brain: Relationship to State and Trait Variables, and Behaviour” (1.01.2021−31.12.2025) from Estonian Research Council
Kairi studies human information processing, including information input, attention and memory, and its relationships to different states humans may have (like emotions or fatigue). She also studies time perception, and mental health in variable conditions ranging from stress to high temperature. She works on relationships between environmental factors and mental health and she is also interested in reseach ethics. She has (co)supervised 7 doctoral dissertations and more than 30 master theses. ETIS / GoogleScholar
Liisi Ausmees, PhD
Research Fellow in Personality and Social Psychology at UT, lecturer
Liisi’s research centres on personality traits and emotional experience. Within the research project, Liisi mainly studies whether and how the stable individual differences in personality and emotions are linked to pre-attentive information processing. GoogleScholar
Aire’s research focuses on how to apply mathematical models to psychology. She is interested in Bernoullian psychophysics, (visual) perception, theoretical and applicational psychometric. ETIS / GoogleScholar
Nele’s research involves different cognitive processes: attention (including pre-attentional processing), memory, perception, speech processing. She wrote her doctoral thesis on automatic processes in visual perception, but also does research in the field of auditory perception and speech processing. ETIS / GoogleScholar
Annegrete Palu
Doctoral student at UT (psychology), Junior Lecturer of Experimental Psychology, Junior Research Fellow in Psychology and Law
Liina’s doctoral research focuses on the bioelectrical correlates of emotion perception and expression and the comparison of emotional expression between human assessment and machine learning solutions. Important problems in the field include the psychological validity of databases used for machine learning, the transferability of posed emotional expression into real life, the presence of mixed emotion and the relation to one’s own perceived emotional experience. The research is carried out in collaboration with the Intelligent Computer Vision Research Laboratory (iCV) of the University of Tartu, led by Professor Gholamreza Anbarjafari. ETIS
Liis Kask
Doctoral student at UT (psychology), Junior Research Fellow in Experimental Psychology
Liis’s research involves language and auditory information proccessing and brainmechanisms in language acquisition. Liis focuses on the specifics of Estonian. ETIS
Liis Themas
Doctoral student of Estonian and General Linguistics at UT, Junior Research Fellow in Speech Perception
Liis is a speech and language therapist and in practical work, she specialized to early intervention, couching parents and schooling teatcher. Liis’s PhD research focuses on children’s pre-attentive speech perception: how typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder perceive Estonian three-way quantities. ETIS
Mai-Liis Liiser
Doctoral student at UT (psychology), Junior Research Fellow in Experimental Psychology
Mai-Liis’s PhD research focuses on pre-attentive information processing and impulsivity. This work continues her master’s levels research, where she studied the relationships between preattentive information processing and behavioural tasks.
Zigmunds Freibergs
Doctoral student at UT (psychology), Junior Research Fellow in Experimental Psychology
Zigmund`s dissertation research focuses on how neural resources are allocated between working memory and attention during cross-modal sensory processing across the lifespan, and how these processes are altered in healthy and impaired aging – particularly in the contexts of mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer`s disease, and genetic predispositions to cognitive decline.
His broader interests include cognitive processes such as memory systems, working memory, attention, and expertise; research methods including EEG (ERPs, time–frequency analysis, EEG-based network analysis, resting-state EEG) and eye-tracking; and broader fields such as network neuroscience, neurobiology, and neuropsychology. ETIS / GoogleScholar
Anna is studying pre-attentional processing of “pure emotion” in the presence of depression and anxiety. Specifically, she investigates how depression and anxiety mediate the preattentive processing of schematic emotional faces.
Kristiina Averin
Doctoral student at UT (psychology), Experimental Psychology Database Specialist