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. My 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. I use 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. from the University of California at San Diego
Additional Campus Affiliations
Recent Publications
Smith, C. M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2019). What does “it” mean, anyway? Examining the time course of semantic activation in reference resolution. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 34(1), 115-136. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1513540
Leckey, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2019). The P3b and P600(s): Positive contributions to language comprehension. Psychophysiology, [e13351]. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13351
Payne, B. R., Stites, M. C., & Federmeier, K. D. (2019). Event-related brain potentials reveal how multiple aspects of semantic processing unfold across parafoveal and foveal vision during sentence reading. Psychophysiology, [e13432]. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13432
Ryskin, R., Ng, S., Mimnaugh, K., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Federmeier, K. D. (2019). Talker-specific predictions during language processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2019.1630654
Rommers, J., & Federmeier, K. D. (2018). Lingering expectations: A pseudo-repetition effect for words previously expected but not presented. NeuroImage, 183, 263-272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.08.023
