Iiris Tuvi (formerly Iiris Luiga)
Iiris is another graduate of the University of Tartu, Department of Psychology. Her doctoral thesis and subsequent work have been most of all dealing with visual attention and object substitution masking. (See her CV also for publications.) But some other topics can be noticed as well, such as TMS studies of visual perception (research still in progress).
Research conducted by Iiris Luiga has produced several interesting results (including as referred to in Scholarpedia). For example, it was shown that object substitution masking (OSM) can be overcome by attentional precueing, but strongly so only if a local pre-cue is used instead of the central pre-cue. Some effects of sensory contrast attributes of targets and masks in OSM were also found. In a recent study, it was shown that for OSM to take effect there is no need to use a local mask; it is sufficient to postpone the offset of a group of globally arranged distracter objects. On the other hand, there are no mutual congruency dependent facilitative or interfering effects between the visual shapes of local targets and global arrangement of masking distracters. By the way, for most of her experiments Iiris does computer programming herself.
From her spare time activities, one cannot escape noticing Iiris’ skills of flamenco-dancing and snowboarding.