About MACCS

The Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS) was established on January 1 2000 with funding from the Australian Research Council with funding for up to nine years under the Council's Special Research Centre scheme. Our remit is to carry out research and research training in cognitive science with particular emphasis on three general domains of cognition: Belief, Visual Cognition and Language. A major thrust of the MACCS research program is to carry out studies of people with acquired or developmental disorders of one or other of these domains as a way of learning more about the normal processes of cognition.

In August 2006, we celebrated the opening of the KIT-Macquarie Brain Research Laboratory. This is the Southern Hemisphere's first neuroimaging laboratory using magnetoencephalography (MEG). During 2006, the Language Acquisition Laboratory was established providing a welcoming environment for studies with children aged 18 months upwards. In addition, existing MACCS facilities include an Eye-tracking laboratory, an ERP laboratory, and a newly outfitted language acquisition laboratory. With the addition of the MEG facility and the language acquisition lab, the Centre will have state-of-the-art stimulus presentation and data analysis systems for the study of auditory and visual cognitive processing in children and adults, along with EEG, eye-tracking and behavioural measures of cognitive processing. MACCS members also have access to five testing rooms that are equipped with PC or Macintosh computers and a state-of-the-art High Performance Computing facility that can help investigators run rapid simulations of various computational models.