Transcript

Professor Andrew Brennan:

Recently we've been looking at the issue of human beings and what drives their behaviour, their attitudes and their morality and in order to understand that we've been looking at the kind of worldviews that underpin people's attitudes and responses to everyday situations.

Associate Professor Cheryl Dissanayake:

My research covers quite a broad range of research topics varying from very applied research to much more basic research. For example from the applied view we're looking at how autism manifests in infants, so we're really trying to understand the very early signs of autism.

Professor Graeme Clarke:

I'm working with Tony Paolini to help make the bionic ear work better in noise. Noise like this is just terrible for people who have any hearing problem and is particularly bad for people with a bionic ear.

Associate Professor Tony Paolini:

One of the key areas of research that we're undertaking is to develop a better bionic ear implant, a hi-fi bionic ear implant, that is an implant that's able to process a lot more information than the current device.

Dr Evan Kidd:

What we do is study how kids learn language, and language is important because it's the most, it's really what makes us unique as humans, we don't share this skill with any other of our closest relatives such as non-human primates like chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. So what we're trying to do is understand the process of language acquisition because language itself is an extremely complex system.

Professor Andrew Brennan:

Lots of our attitudes and worldviews are related to religious views, but these religious views are no longer ones that are very relevant in determining policy matters in a multicultural society. So we've been looking at questions of human rights, human dignity, and human values and asking how in a multicultural secular society it is possible to find a solid foundation for these.

Associate Professor Cheryl Dissanayake:

These disorders affect one in one hundred children and they can be quite debilitating and so the disorder not only affects the child but also the family around them. So focusing in on these disorders and trying to understand them helps us then to develop treatments and focused intervention programs that help the child and the family, and really ultimately the community.

Associate Professor Tony Paolini:

Currently the cochlear implant only has twenty-two or twenty-four channels. What we're trying to do is improve the number of channels in the cochlear implant to include hundreds of channels within the cochlear so we can activate those pathways in the brain that help us hear speech in noise.

Dr Evan Kidd:

Well, language is a uniquely human capacity. We don't share this capacity with our closest primate relatives. So, also language is a very complex system and children tend to be privileged language learners, they learn language so much easier and a lot more quickly than say an adult learning a second language.

Professor Andrew Brennan:

We actually understand many animals better than we understand ourselves, and so it's really important to recognise that there are difficulties about understanding what makes human beings tick that require not just psychology and biochemistry and all the other sciences that require philosophers to come along and investigate the conceptual foundations for the way we live.

Associate Professor Cheryl Dissanayake:

Rather than relying on gross measures of behaviour using things like questionnaires and interviews, I focus very much on the behaviour of the child and we study that behaviour in a very detailed way, and what you do is when you focus on behaviour in this way you find that these children have much more abilities than we had otherwise understood. So their impairments are much more circumscribed than what we previously believed.

Professor Graeme Clarke:

The average person doesn't understand what it's like to be deaf, doesn't understand what it's like not to be in the conversation and to have people like even our first patient saying to me, 'You've given me back my life.' To have children hearing and speaking normally or near normally for the first time just moves me to tears still.

Dr Evan Kidd:

Understanding how we think, behave and act is important for almost everything we do, so for instance psychology, given that it's a young science becoming more sophisticated is going to really help us to face some of the challenges that are facing the human race currently such as things like climate change.

Professor Andrew Brennan:

It's very important to recognise that not all the things that drive human behaviour are economic conditions or material conditions that people are actually governed to some extent by the material conditions in which they live, the place they live, the money they are earning, the circumstances they are in but its also important to understand what kind of bigger structures of belief and value influence human action and behaviour. I'm Professor Andrew Brennan. I'm a Professor of Philosophy at La Trobe University, I'm also Pro-Vice Chancellor of Graduate Research.

Associate Professor Cheryl Dissanayake:

My name is Dr Cheryl Dissanayake, and I'm a developmental psychologist, I'm also the Director of the Olga Tennison Autism Research Centre at La Trobe University.

Professor Graeme Clarke:

I'm Professor Graeme Clarke and I'm here at La Trobe, Chief Advisor to the new Centre for Bionic Ear and Neurosensory Research.

Associate Professor Tony Paolini:

My name is Associate Professor Tony Paolini, I am the Director of the Centre for Bionic Ear and Neurosensory Research here at La Trobe University.

Dr Evan Kidd:

My name is Evan Kidd and I'm a developmental psychologist at La Trobe University.