Kara Federmeier, Ph.D.

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