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.
She graduated as valedictorian from Danville High School in 1990[1] before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
[citation needed] She received her PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego in 2000.
[citation needed] In 2013 she was named the Emanuel Donchin Professorial Scholar in Psychology.
[6] 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").