Using a visual-to-auditory sensory-substitution algorithm, congenitally fully blind adults were taught to read and recognize complex images using "soundscapes"--sounds topographically representing images. fMRI was used to examine key questions regarding the visual word form area (VWFA): its selectivity for letters over other visual categories without visual experience, its feature tolerance for...

The placement and development of the visual word form area (VWFA) have commonly been assumed to depend, in part, on its connections with language regions. In this study, we specifically examined the effects of auditory speech experience deprivation in shaping the VWFA by investigating its location distribution, activation strength, and functional connectivity pattern in congenitally deaf partic...

The visual word form area (VWFA) is a ventral stream visual area that develops expertise for visual reading. It is activated across writing systems and scripts and encodes letter strings irrespective of case, font, or location in the visual field with striking anatomical reproducibility across individuals. In the blind, comparable reading expertise can be achieved using Braille. This study inve...

The nature of orthographic representations in the human brain is still subject of much debate. Recent reports have claimed that the visual word form area (VWFA) in left occipitotemporal cortex contains an orthographic lexicon based on neuronal representations highly selective for individual written real words (RWs). This theory predicts that learning novel words should selectively increase neur...

When reading a narrative text, both the dorsal and ventral visual systems are activated. To illustrate the patterns of interactions between the dorsal and ventral visual systems in text reading, we conducted analyses of functional connectivity (FC) and effective connectivity (EC) in a left-hemispheric network for reading-driven functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and resting-state fMRI...

Circuitry in ventral occipital-temporal cortex is essential for seeing words. We analyze the circuitry within a specific ventral-occipital region, the visual word form area (VWFA). The VWFA is immediately adjacent to the retinotopically organized VO-1 and VO-2 visual field maps and lies medial and inferior to visual field maps within motion selective human cortex. Three distinct white matter fa...

Based on our previous work, we expected the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) in the left ventral visual pathway to be engaged by both whole-word recognition and by serial sublexical coding of letter strings. To examine this double function, a phonological lexical decision task (i.e., "Does xxx sound like an existing word?") presented short and long letter strings of words, pseudohomophones, and pse...

The visual word form area (VWFA), a region systematically involved in the identification of written words, occupies a reproducible location in the left occipitotemporal sulcus in expert readers of all cultures. Such a reproducible localization is paradoxical, given that reading is a recent invention that could not have influenced the genetic evolution of the cortex. Here, we test the hypothesis...

H ow does our brain achieve its impressive expertise to effortlessly read written words? It has been proposed that a key element of the capability to recognize visually presented words (as well as other objects) is a normalization process that is assumed to operate along the visual hierarchy. This normalization process would remove varying aspects of presented words from the evoked retinal repr...