World's first child/adult MEG lab at Macquarie University
A range of cognitive research areas are set to benefit from the world's first multi-million dollar child and adult magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imaging laboratory to be housed at Macquarie University.
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Professor Stephen Crain |
One such research area of interest to psycholinguist and Australian Research Council (ARC) Federation Fellow Professor Stephen Crain is the question of why children can learn any language.
Crain believes that babies are born with a certain amount of innate knowledge about language, which explains the ease of language acquisition by children.
Universal properties of language
Crain is interested in the universal properties of language - the things that are the same across languages - because he believes those properties are the best candidates to be part of human biology.
He has previously conducted behavioural studies with children to investigate how logical expressions such as and and or are learned in English and other languages such as Chinese and Japanese.
He found that language and logic share some of the same basic notions, including the meaning of natural language disjunction (English or, Japanese ka and Chinese huozhe). He chose to study logic because the ability to reason with language is common to all language users.
Crain already has the behavioural experiments to support his hypothesis, but part of his Federation Fellowship involves the furthering of this research using MEG brain imaging technology.
"MEG will allow us to try something that has never been tried before," Crain says. "If we are right in thinking that there are specific brain structures that correspond to certain properties of language, then we may be able to reveal these using the MEG technology."
How does MEG work?
MEG measures brain activity by detecting the weak magnetic fields produced when groups of neurons in the brain fire electrical impulses. It allows direct, non-invasive measurements of both the intensity and location of brain activity.
"Using MEG we will be able to observe the brain's activity as a person is processing language in real time. MEG provides a very accurate measure of such activity, with temporal resolution on the order of one millisecond and spatial resolution up to five millimetres," Crain explains.
A research only facility
While MEG does have medical applications, the MEG laboratory at Macquarie University will be a research facility only, to be used by Macquarie and its partner institutions to further understanding of the neural activity underlying cognition. Other cognitive research areas that will benefit from MEG analysis include schizophrenia, autism, dyslexia and auditory processing.
"The use of MEG in cognitive science is very new and a lot of basic behavioural research will be revisited using this brain imaging technology," Crain says.
The ARC-funded million dollar child MEG research facility will be managed by Macquarie University in collaboration with the Yokowaga Electric Corporation of Japan. The $1.1 million adult MEG facility (set to open in August) has been funded by an ARC Linkage grant in collaboration with Japan's Kanazawa Institute of Technology and the contributions of partner institutions the University of Newcastle, Swinburne University, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne and the University of Auckland.
Visit http://www.maccs.mq.edu.au/laboratories/meg/ for more information on the MEG laboratory and proposed research projects.