New research opportunities in cognitive science
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Professor Anne Castles |
Exciting new opportunities for postgraduate research students are opening up in the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS).
MACCS will welcome five highly regarded researchers appointed this year under the University's Concentrations of Research Excellence (CORE) scheme, each of whom will take on a number of postgraduate students. The new appointees bring strengths in children's reading problems, neuropsychology, brain imaging and visual cognition.
"Our new appointees will add to our current strengths and enable us to develop new research in learning to read and dyslexia, philosophy related to cognitive science, language processing, visual cognition and the genetic basis of cognitive disorders," says MACCS Scientific Director Professor Max Coltheart.
The Centre, which is equipped with the only brain imaging laboratory in the southern hemisphere to use magnetoencephalography (MEG), is also looking to increase its strength in brain imaging research, including work on how brain processes develop in children.
New appointees
The new appointees are:
- Dyslexia expert Professor Anne Castles from the University of Melbourne
- Neuropsychology expert Associate Professor Greg Savage from Monash University
- MEG expert Dr Blake Johnson from the University of Auckland
- Visual attention expert Dr Anina Rich from the University of Melbourne (currently at Harvard)
- Face and object perception expert Dr Mark Williams from the University of Melbourne (currently at MIT)
For Professor Anne Castles, the Cognitive Science CORE appointment gives her the opportunity to focus on her research into reading and its disorders, in a stimulating and supportive research environment.
"My research deals with the cognitive, perceptual and linguistic skills that are involved in learning to read, and with the ways in which these skills may fail in children and adults who have difficulty reading," explains Castles. "Projects I am involved in include studies of normal reading development in young children, studies of factors affecting skilled reading in adults, and studies of different types of reading disorders."
Castles has already taken on one research student since arriving at Macquarie and one has joined her from the University of Melbourne. She is hoping to take on several more.
Dr Anina Rich, who has spent the past two years at one of the premier visual attention labs in the world, will bring strengths in visual cognition, specifically visual attention to MACCS when she arrives from the United States later this year.
"I am interested in the mechanisms of attention that underpin our conscious experience of the world," explains Rich. "My other major research area is synaesthesia, where a stimulus is involuntarily linked with an additional experience (e.g., a sound elicits a colour experience). Although synaesthesia is not a disorder, it does provide an unusual perspective on perception."
Rich, who has ongoing collaborations with colleagues at Harvard and MIT, hopes that her international colleagues will visit MACCS to give talks and maintain relationships. She is looking forward to taking on postgraduate students in 2008.
For further information on the Cognitive Science CORE at Macquarie University contact Professor Max Coltheart max.coltheart@mq.edu.au or visit www.maccs.mq.edu.au/