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Department of Cognitive Science

MEG Collaborations

The MEG laboratory is called the KIT-Macquarie Brain Research Lab, in recognition of the collaboration between Macquarie University and the Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT), Japan. KIT and Yokogawa Electric Corporation have generously assisted us in designing a state-of-the-art presentation and analysis system for MEG-related studies using auditory and visual stimulus materials, and integrating data analysis from MEG with those from EEG, fMRI and eye-movement recording.
With Macquarie University's partner hearing organizations, we are planning a third MEG system to assist in the rehabilitation of young children who receive cochlear implants. Recipients of a cochlear implant receive extensive rehabilitation to recognize the sounds of speech. Hearing is assessed by asking the cochlear implant recipient to report their subjective impressions of sounds. This is a difficult and frustrating process for adults, and children younger than 3 or 4 cannot perform this feat at all. Yet cochlear implants are being fitted to babies as young as 3 months old. To overcome these difficulties, we are developing the world's first measurement system using MEG to provide objective measures of how recipients of a cochlear implant, including very young children, hear the sounds of speech.

An international collaboration between the Macquarie University and Beijing Language and Culture University is studying the question: Do pre-school children learning different languages know universal properties of language? To answer this,  researchers from these two universities have tested 4 year old English and Mandarin speaking children using MEG.