In collaboration with Henry L. (Roddy) Roediger III, she developed the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm used to study the phenomenon of memory illusions.
McDermott subsequently joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis where she holds the title Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
[5][2] McDermott is best known for her work with Roediger in which they developed and refined a free recall task for the purpose of eliciting false memories (the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm).
In other work, McDermott and her colleagues used fMRI to create a map of human neural activity associated with word, object, and face encoding.
[8] In work with Karl Szpunar and Jason Watson, McDermott mapped patterns of neural activity associated with the act of envisioning personally significant events, such as one's birthday.