Kara Federmeier

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.

Education and career
She graduated as valedictorian from Danville High School in 1990 before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2000. In 2002, she became a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois. In 2013 she was named the Emanuel Donchin Professorial Scholar in Psychology.

From 2016 to 2019, she was president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Research
Federmeier’s research is focused on understanding how the brain builds and stores representations of meaning, with a particular focus on language comprehension and memory. Her early work used the event-related potential technique to examine language comprehension. She has shown that the right and left sides of the brain can representing knowledge in similar ways. 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").

Awards and honors
In 2006, the Society for Psychophysiology presented her with an award for distinguished early career contributions to psychophysiology. In 2012, she was named a University Scholar by the University of Illinois.

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.