Kara Federmeier is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Neuroscience program at the University of Illinois and a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute Cognitive Neuroscience Group. Her fields of professional interest are language, memory, hemispheric differences, and cognitive neuroscience.

Education

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

• 2013-2016: Named a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Centennial Scholar
• 2013: Named the Emanuel Donchin Professorial Scholar in Psychology  
• 2012-2015: University Scholar
• 2012: Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science 
• 2010-2016: James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award, Understanding Human Cognition Initiative 
• 2010: Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award 
• 2009: Arnold O. Beckman Research Award, University of Illinois 
• 2008-2009: Helen Corley Petit Scholar
• 2006: Society for Psychophysiology Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions to Psychophysiology 

Research areas:

• Language processing

• Semantic memory

• Aging

Research interests:

• Neurobiological basis

• Hemispheric differences

• Electrophysiology (EEG, ERPs)

Certain sensory stimuli—words, pictures, faces, environmental 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 (ERPs), supplemented by behavioral, eye tracking, and hemodynamic measures.

Federmeier's research has shown, for example, that a crucial part of a sentence context's influence on word processing is mediated through long-term memory structure: the physical and functional similarity between two semantic category members impacts processing, even when such relationships do not alter a word's subjective plausibility in its context. Her research further suggests that this use of world knowledge varies as a function of mood and the availability of various cognitive resources, and also as a function of the representation type used to cue that information. Different semantic information is accessed from words and pictures (and from the same picture as a function of experience), suggesting that semantic processing takes place in a distributed system in which input modality information is not completely lost. Different ERPs to words from different classes (e.g., nouns vs. verbs) further supports the notion of a structured yet shared semantic system, one sensitive to the nature of the information associated with a word (e.g., visual vs. motor associations) as well as to the roles it plays in various contexts. Indeed, Federmeier's work has revealed that perceptual processing itself (as indexed by sensory-and attention-related ERP components) is influenced by language context information, highlighting the inseparability of "perceptual" and "conceptual" analyses of a meaningful stimulus.

By combining ERPs with visual-half-field techniques (used to preferentially stimulate one cerebral hemisphere), Federmeier has also found that the two hemispheres differ in how they use word and picture information to access world knowledge. Whereas left hemisphere-initiated processing seems oriented toward prediction and the use of top-down cues, right hemisphere-initiated processing seems biased toward the veridical maintenance of information and integration with working memory. Overall, Federmeier's research suggests that our experience of meaning is shaped by both the structure of our world knowledge and the structure of the brain network that supports this knowledge. Meaning seems effortless, immediate, and unified—but is, instead, constructed in space and time and multiply expressed.