Stephanie Huang

Stephanie Huang

PhD Student in Neuroscience @ VUW

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Journal Articles

Impaired perception of Mooney faces in developmental prosopagnosia

Published in Cognition, 2026

Despite much research, the mechanisms underlying face perception deficits in developmental prosopagnosia (DP) remain unclear. Here we address this issue using Mooney faces – two-tone, ambiguous stimuli requiring holistic and top-down processing due to their minimal explicit facial cues. We conducted two experiments testing DP participants ability to perceive faces using sensitive Mooney tasks. Experiment 1 (N = 52 DP participants) showed that perception of Mooney faces in DP is impaired. Experiment 2 (N = 64 DP participants) replicated this finding and revealed that the impairment is selective to upright faces, sparing perception of inverted faces and cars. Our results corroborate previous findings of impaired holistic processing in DP and suggest that DP deficits may involve aberrant top-down perceptual inference for faces.

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Protocols

DiI Labelling with a Paintbrush: a Low-cost Alternative to DiOlistic Labelling in Neurons

Published in protocols.io, 2024

DiOlistic labelling is a high-throughput technique commonly used to label neurons in fixed brain tissue using the fluorescent lipophilic carbocyanine dye, DiI. It labels a large population of neurons in a dense yet distributed pattern, making it ideal for morphological studies. However, DiOlistic labelling typically requires an expensive commercial gene gun. Therefore, our protocol presents a low-cost alternative using materials that are already available in most laboratories (e.g. a plastic 12-well culture plate lid) or easily acquired at a low price (e.g. a paintbrush). We detail the DiI labelling process, including the preparation, delivery, incubation, and post-processing steps. Overall, this protocol labels a large population of neurons in a dense yet distributed pattern and, therefore, is a simple and low-cost alternative to DiOlistic labelling.

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Conference Posters