Brain and Cognition and Cognitive Divisions

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 explores 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 hemodynamic measures to examine how semantic information is structured as a function of modality and stimulus type, how it is brought to bear during language comprehension, and how it is differentially accessed and used by the two hemispheres of the brain.

Representative Publications:

• Laszlo, S. and Federmeier, K. D. (2008). Minding the PS, queues, and PXQs: Uniformity of semantic processing across multiple stimulus types. Psychophysiology, 45, 458-466.
• Wlotko, E. and Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Finding the right word: Hemispheric asymmetries in the use of sentence context information. Neuropsychologia, 45, 3001-3014.
• Federmeier, K. D. (2007). Thinking ahead: The role and roots of prediction in language comprehension. Psychophysiology, 44, 491-505.
• Evans, K M. and Federmeier, K. D. (2007). 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, 45, 1777-1790.
• Lee, C. and Federmeier, K. D. (2006). To mind the mind: An event-related potential study of word class and word class ambiguity. Brain Research, 1081, 191-202.

Classes Recently Taught:

• Psych 224: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
• Psych 450: Cognitive Psychophysiology