Authority control databases: Academics
Authority control databases: Academics  |
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Categories
Kara Federmeier | |
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| Alma mater | University of California, San Diego |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Sense and structure : electrophysiological investigations of semantic memory organization and use (1999) |
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. 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.
She graduated as valedictorian from Danville High School in 1990[1] 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.[2] 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.[2]
From 2016 to 2019, she was president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research.[3]
Federmeier’s research is focused on understanding how the brain builds and stores representations of meaning,[4] with a particular focus on language comprehension and memory. Her early work used the event-related potential technique to examine language comprehension.[5] She has shown that the right and left sides of the brain can representing knowledge in similar ways.[6] 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").[7]
In 2006, the Society for Psychophysiology presented her with an award for distinguished early career contributions to psychophysiology.[2] In 2012, she was named a University Scholar by the University of Illinois.[8]