Kara Federmeier
American psychologist
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Kara D. Federmeier is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Department of Kinesiology, and the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well as faculty at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where she leads the Illinois Language and Literacy Initiative.[1] She is known for her work using human electrophysiology to understand the neural basis of cognition, with a focus on language and memory in both younger and older adults.
Kara Federmeier | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | University of California, San Diego |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Sense and structure : electrophysiological investigations of semantic memory organization and use (1999) |
Education and career
She graduated as valedictorian from Danville High School in 1990[2] before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[citation needed] She received her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2000[3] where she conducted her research under the mentorship of Marta Kutas.[4] In 2002, she became a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois.[citation needed] In 2013 she was named the Emanuel Donchin Professorial Scholar in Psychology.[3]
From 2016 to 2019, she was president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research.[5]
Research
Federmeier’s research is focused on understanding how the brain builds and stores representations of meaning,[6] with a particular focus on language comprehension and memory. Her early work used the event-related potential technique to examine language comprehension.[7] She has shown that the right and left sides of the brain can representing knowledge in similar ways.[8] Her more recent work has shown that when individuals encounter a meaningful stimulus, like a word or picture, they seem to near-immediately link it to large swaths of information in long-term memory in a graded fashion ("connecting").[9]
Awards and honors
Selected publications
- Federmeier, K.D. and Kutas, M. (1999). A rose by any other name: Long-term memory structure and sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 469-495.
- Kutas, M. and Federmeier, K. D. (2000). Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Science, 4, 463-470.
- Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension. Psychophysiology, 44, 491-505.
- Fabiani, Monica; Gratton, Gabriele; Federmeier, Kara D. (2007), Cacioppo, John T.; Tassinary, Louis G.; Berntson, Gary (eds.), "Event-Related Brain Potentials: Methods, Theory, and Applications", Handbook of Psychophysiology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 85–119, doi:10.1017/cbo9780511546396.004, ISBN 978-0-511-54639-6, retrieved 2024-01-02
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link) - Kutas, Marta; Federmeier, Kara D. (2011-01-10). "Thirty Years and Counting: Finding Meaning in the N400 Component of the Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP)". Annual Review of Psychology. 62 (1): 621–647. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131123. ISSN 0066-4308. PMC 4052444. PMID 20809790.