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Federmeier, Kara D.
Associate Professor, Psychology
B.S., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
M.S. and Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
Research Areas
Language, memory, hemispheric differences, and cognitive neuroscience
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. To study these time-sensitive processes, I use event-related brain potentials (ERPs), supplemented by behavioral, eye tracking, and hemodynamic measures.
My research has shown, for example, that a crucial part of a sentence context‘s influence on word processing is mediated through long-term memory structure: the physical and functional similarity between two semantic category members impacts processing, even when such relationships do not alter a word‘s subjective plausibility in its context. My research further suggests that this use of world knowledge varies as a function of mood and the availability of various cognitive resources, and also as a function of the representation type used to cue that information. Different semantic information is accessed from words and pictures (and from the same picture as a function of experience), suggesting that semantic processing takes place in a distributed system in which input modality information is not completely lost. Different ERPs to words from different classes (e.g., nouns vs. verbs) further supports the notion of a structured yet shared semantic system, one sensitive to the nature of the information associated with a word (e.g., visual vs. motor associations) as well as to the roles it plays in various contexts. Indeed, my work has revealed that perceptual processing itself (as indexed by sensory-and attention-related ERP components) is influenced by language context information, highlighting the inseparability of "perceptual" and "conceptual" analyses of a meaningful stimulus.
By combining ERPs with visual-half-field techniques (used to preferentially stimulate one cerebral hemisphere), I have also found that the two hemispheres differ in how they use word and picture information to access world knowledge. Whereas left hemisphere-initiated processing seems oriented toward prediction and the use of top-down cues, right hemisphere-initiated processing seems biased toward the veridical maintenance of information and integration with working memory. Overall, my research suggests that our experience of meaning is shaped by both the structure of our world knowledge and the structure of the brain network that supports this knowledge. Meaning seems effortless, immediate, and unified - but is, instead, constructed in space and time and multiply expressed.
Representative Publications
Federmeier, K. D.; Wlotko, E.; Meyer, A. M. Whats right in language comprehension: ERPs reveal right hemisphere language capabilities. Language and Linguistics Compass 2008, 2, 1-17.
Laszlo, S.; Federmeier, K. D.; Minding the PS, queues, and PXQs: Uniformity of semantic processing across multiple stimulus types. Psychophysiology 2008, 45, 458-466.
Lee, C. L.; Federmeier, K. D., To watch, to see, and to differ: An event-related potential study of concreteness effects as a function of word class and lexical ambiguity. Brain and Language 2008, 104, (2), 145-158.
Evans, K. M.; Federmeier, K. D., The memory that's right and the memory that's left: Event-related potentials reveal hemispheric asymmetries in the encoding and retention of verbal information. Neuropsychologia 2007, 45, (8), 1777-1790.
Federmeier, K. D., Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension. Psychophysiology 2007, 44, (4), 491-505.
Federmeier, K. D.; Laszlo, S., Deriving meaning from ERPS ... and other acronyms. Psychophysiology 2007, 44, S6-S6.
Federmeier, K. D.; Wlotko, E. W.; De Ochoa-Dewald, E.; Kutas, M., Multiple effects of sentential constraint on word processing. Brain Research 2007, 1146, 75-84.
Gratton, C.; Evans, K. M.; Federmeier, K. D., Generalizing knowledge: ERPS reveal the time-course of retrieval of novel categories. Psychophysiology 2007, 44, S61-S61.
Gutchess, A. H.; Leuji, Y.; Federmeier, K. D., Event-related potentials reveal age differences in the encoding and recognition of scenes. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2007, 19, (7), 1089-1103.
Kandhadai, P.; Federmeier, K. D.; Multiple priming of lexically ambiguous and unambiguous targets in the cerebral hemispheres: The coarse coding hypothesis revisited. Brain Research 2007, 1153, 144-157.
Laszlo, S.; Federmeier, K. D., How I learned to stop worrying and love the VCR: N400 processing of illegal strings in sentence context. Psychophysiology 2007, 44, S62-S62.
Laszlo, S.; Federmeier, K. D., The acronym superiority effect. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2007, 14, (6), 1158-1163.
Laszlo, S.; Federmeier, K. D.; Better the DVL you know: Acronyms reveal the contribution of familiarity to single-word reading. Psychological Science 2007, 18 (2), 122-126.
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