Kara D Federmeier

About

Kara D Federmeier is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois, and a full-time faculty member at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where she leads the Illinois Language and Literacy Initiative. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2000. Her research in the Cognition and Brain Lab examines the neurobiological basis of meaning, focusing on how world knowledge from multiple modalities is organized in the brain and how this information is integrated and accessed in various contexts within hundreds of milliseconds. Her work employs human electrophysiological techniques, behavioral methods, eye movement analysis, and brain imaging to explore how semantic information is structured by modality and stimulus type, how it is utilized during language comprehension by different age groups, and how the two hemispheres of the brain access and use this information.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Neuroscience
• Physics

Selected publications

• Connecting and considering: Electrophysiology provides insights into comprehension

  Psychophysiology · 2021 · 123 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The ability to rapidly and systematically access knowledge stored in long-term memory in response to incoming sensory information-that is, to derive meaning from the world-lies at the core of human cognition. Research using methods that can precisely track brain activity over time has begun to reveal the multiple cognitive and neural mechanisms that make this possible. In this article, I delineate how a process of connecting affords an effortless, continuous infusion of meaning into human percep…

  DOI

• Context-based facilitation of semantic access follows both logarithmic and linear functions of stimulus probability

  Journal of Memory and Language · 2021 · 70 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Stimuli are easier to process when context makes them predictable, but does context-based facilitation arise from preactivation of a limited set of relatively probable upcoming stimuli (with facilitation then linearly related to probability) or, instead, because the system maintains and updates a probability distribution across all items (with facilitation logarithmically related to probability)? We measured the N400, an index of semantic access, to words of varying probability, including unpred…

  DOI

• The N300: An Index for Predictive Coding of Complex Visual Objects and Scenes

  Cerebral Cortex Communications · 2021 · 45 citations

  Predictive coding models can simulate known perceptual or neuronal phenomena, but there have been fewer attempts to identify a reliable neural signature of predictive coding for complex stimuli. In a pair of studies, we test whether the N300 component of the event-related potential, occurring 250-350-ms poststimulus-onset, has the response properties expected for such a signature of perceptual hypothesis testing at the level of whole objects and scenes. We show that N300 amplitudes are smaller t…

  DOI

• Alcohol and Neural Dynamics: A Meta-analysis of Acute Alcohol Effects on Event-Related Brain Potentials

  Biological Psychiatry · 2020 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Altered oscillatory neural dynamics related to word prediction in older adult readers

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2024-07-12 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The engagement of predictive mechanisms during language comprehension can facilitate processing and modulate neural oscillatory activity. These modulations include alpha-band activity decreases prior to expected words, reflecting anticipatory preparation, and frontal theta-band activity following unexpected words, reflecting engagement of cognitive control. It remains unknown how these oscillatory dynamics are impacted by aging. Here, we re-analyzed previously collected EEG data from a sentence…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Hemispheric differences in memory and language

  NIH · $4.5M · 2005–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Brennan R. Payne

  University of Utah

  41 shared

• Marta Kutas

  University of California, San Diego

  34 shared

• Neal J. Cohen

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

  20 shared

• Monica Fabiani

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  18 shared

• Nils Corson

  Sinai Health System

  16 shared

• Stuart J. Johnstone

  16 shared

• Colette M. Smart

  University of Victoria

  16 shared

• Benjamin Zimmerman

  National University of Natural Medicine

  16 shared

Labs

• Cognition and Brain LabPI

  The Cognition and Brain Lab conducts research on human capacities for learning, memory, and language.

Awards & honors

• Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions to Psycho…
• Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award (201…
• University Scholar (2012)
• College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Centennial Scholar (201…
• Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Florin Dolcosh-58
• Howard Berenbaumh-50