Kara Federmeier is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. Her fields of professional interest are language, memory, hemispheric differences and cognitive neuroscience.

Certain sensory stimuli — words, pictures, faces, sounds — seem to immediately and effortlessly bring to mind a rich array of knowledge that we experience as the "meaning" of those cues. Federmeier's research examines the neurobiological basis of such meaning, asking how world knowledge derived from multiple modalities comes to be organized in the brain and how such information is integrated and made available for use in varied contexts and often in only hundreds of milliseconds. To study these time-sensitive processes, Federmeier uses event-related brain potentials, or ERPs, supplemented by behavioral, eye tracking, and hemodynamic measures.

Research areas:

  • Language processing

  • Semantic memory

  • Aging

Research interests:

  • Neurobiological basis

  • Hemispheric differences

  • Electrophysiology (EEG, ERPs)

Education

  • Ph.D., cognitive science, University of California at San Diego, 2000

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What our brain’s electrical signals reveal about language, meaning and memory

By measuring the brain’s electrical signals, researchers in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology's Cognition and Brain Lab explore how the brain links sensory information to meaning and memory.
28-Oct-2024 12:40:27 PM EDT

“Everything we do depends on what happens when we see a word and activate stuff. What do we activate? How quickly do we activate it? The answer to all of these questions determines how well we comprehend our world and each other.”

- What our brain’s electrical signals reveal about language, meaning and memory

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