Biography
Kara 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. Research in her lab, the Cognition and Brain Lab, has been funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Institute of Education Sciences, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Kara received the Award for Distinguished Early Career Contributions to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiology in 2006 and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award in 2010. In 2012, she was named a University Scholar and in 2013 a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Centennial Scholar. She was President of the Society for Psychophysiology (2017-2019). She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Psychonomic Society, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She edits The Psychology of Learning and Motivation.
Research Interests
Language processing
Semantic memory
Aging
Hemispheric differences
Electrophysiology (EEG, ERPs)
Research Description
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. Kara'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. Her research group uses human electrophysiological techniques in combination with behavioral, eye movement, and other brain imaging methods to examine how semantic information is structured as a function of modality and stimulus type, how it is brought to bear during language comprehension by younger and older adults, and how it is differentially accessed and used by the two hemispheres of the brain.
Education
Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of California at San Diego (2000)
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Psychology
Professor, Kinesiology and Community Health
Professor, Neuroscience Program
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Recent Publications
Bogdan, P. C., Dolcos, S., Federmeier, K. D., Lleras, A., Schwarb, H., & Dolcos, F. (2025). Emotional dissociations in temporal associations: opposing effects of arousal on memory for details surrounding unpleasant events. Cognition and Emotion, 39(1), 82-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2023.2270196
Deng, W., Dickson, D. S., & Federmeier, K. D. (2025). Semantic Processing of Arabic Numbers Across Tasks. Psychophysiology, 62(6), Article e70082. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.70082
Federmeier, K. D., Lee, C. L., & Kutas, M. (2025). N400 event-related potential indices of induced mood effects on access to category-based world knowledge in central and lateralized visual fields. Discourse Processes, 62(4), 284-308. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/0163853X.2025.2493035
Jacobs, C. L., Hubbard, R. J., Grobol, L., & Federmeier, K. D. (2025). Uncovering patterns of semantic predictability in sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 144, Article 104653. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2025.104653
Troyer, M., Stine-Morrow, E. A. L., & Federmeier, K. D. (2025). Diffindo! Precise language comprehension in older adulthood revealed by event-related brain potential studies of domain knowledge. Cognition, 263, Article 106210. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2025.106210