Research
In addition to her clinical work, Crystal Wong is a doctoral researcher in visual neuroscience at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research examines the neural mechanisms and modulation of visual cognitive function, combining transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking. A selection of her research is presented below.
Main research directions
The visual cognitive mechanisms underlying developmental dyslexia in children—the role of the magnocellular-dorsal pathway in reading, and the causal function of the motion-sensitive area V5/MT+. This work has been presented at the international conferences ARVO and CNS in both oral and poster formats.
Publications and conference presentations (selected)
Wong, S.C., Cheong, A.M.Y., Chan, H.H.L., Liu, D., & Leung, T.W. (School of Optometry, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Department of Special Education and Counselling, The Education University of Hong Kong). This study compared children with developmental dyslexia (DD) and typically developing (TD) children. The dyslexic group showed weaker visually evoked potential (VEP) responses to large, low-spatial-frequency stimuli and poorer performance on working memory and visual attention span. These findings indicate that Chinese developmental dyslexia is associated with magnocellular dysfunction at the level of the visual cortex, accompanied by cognitive deficits, providing a basis for understanding the relationship between reading difficulty and visual processing and for developing targeted visual interventions.
CNS 2025 conference poster · click to enlarge
Wong, S.-C., Leung, T.-W., Thompson, B., & Cheong, A. M. Y. (2024). Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 65(7), 2453. Read the article →
We used a non-invasive form of magnetic stimulation (TMS) to briefly modulate the brain region dedicated to detecting motion (V5/MT+), and observed how this affected motion detection in the left and right visual fields. The results show that this region plays a direct causal role in "seeing movement", with specificity for the left and right visual fields. This helps us understand how the brain processes dynamic vision, and how motion perception might in future be assessed and trained in a targeted way.
Wong, S.-C., Kee, C.-S., & Leung, T.-W. (2022). Children, 9(6), 919. doi:10.3390/children9060919. This study examined the refractive error and axial length data of Hong Kong children following COVID-19 school closures, finding an increased prevalence of astigmatism associated with axial elongation—reflecting the impact of changes in lifestyle and visual habits during the pandemic on children's visual development.