Specialization within the ventral stream: the case for the visual word form area

In the paper

“At the same time, however, very small details that are relevant to reading are maintained and even amplified.”

In the paper

“When word reading is contrasted to a resting period, the active regions obviously comprise a large unspecific component of visual activity.”

In the paper

“Thus, Booth et al. (2002a, 2003) observed an activation of the VWFA (TC 45, 57, 12) when subjects engaged in a spelling task on auditory words, but not when they engaged in a rhyming task on the same stimuli.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Booth et al. (2002a, 2003)

In the paper

“Essentially all subjects show wordinduced activation in the left hemisphere, whereas a symmetrical right-sided activation is only found in a few subjects and at a weaker level.”

In the paper

“Consistent with a topdown effect, we observed a left posterior inferotemporal activation even when spoken words were presented, and with a greater intensity during the grapheme task than during the phoneme task.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Cohen et al., in preparation

In the paper

“Furthermore, the anterior activations were sensitive to the semantic demands of the task, whereas the posterior activations were observed even for visual pseudo-words relative to random letter strings.”

In the paper

“Puce et al. (1996) report single-subject activations during passive presentation of visual words, faces, and textures. Nine out of twelve subjects showed greater activation to words than to faces in the left occipitotemporal sulcus, although a neighboring but slightly more mesial site conversely showed preferential activation to faces than to words.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Puce et al. (1996) source

In the paper

“Hasson et al. (2003) suggest that the visual word-related activation always falls at a systematic location at the boundary between object-selective and face-selective regions in a large-scale map of object preference.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Hasson et al. (2003) source

In the paper

“In agreement with our hypotheses, in every subject, the left posterior fusiform gyrus was activated by visual words but there was no trace of activation by spoken words.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Dehaene et al., 2002 source

In the paper

“This region showed the same selectivity whether the stimuli were presented foveally or peripherally, confirming a previous demonstration of location invariance in this region (Cohen et al., 2000).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Cohen et al., 2000 source

In the paper

“However, recent work using MEG to compare spoken and written word processing confirms that posterior inferior temporal activation is present early on (approximately 170 ms) when reading words, but are absent or confined to the late part of the epoch when hearing words (Marinkovic et al., 2003, Figs. 1 and 4).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Marinkovic et al., 2003 source

In the paper

“Recently, for instance, we showed that its posterior part contains case-invariant but not location-invariant letter detectors, whereas its middle part is invariant across both case and location and may be sensitive to units larger that a single letter (see Dehaene et al., in press).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Dehaene et al., in press

In the paper

“More anteriorily, priming became location invariant, though present for both words and their anagrams, suggesting a location-invariant sublexical code.”

In the paper

“Although this region was admittedly larger than the VWFA strictly defined, it precisely encompassed the region of activation to words identified in fMRI studies of reading (Cohen et al., 2003).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Cohen et al., 2003 source

In the paper

“We formulated the idea that an area in the midportion of the left fusiform gyrus, which activates whenever literate subjects are presented with strings of letters, contributes crucially to the cerebral basis of the visual word form.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Cohen et al., 2000 source

In the paper

“Our visual system is attuned to the minute difference between ''eight'' and ''sight'', which it amplifies so that we ultimately address completely different regions of lexical space, although it discards the much greater differences between ''eight'' and ''EIGHT''.”

In the paper

“We show that it must achieve perceptual invariance, parallel letter processing, and tuning to a specific writing system.”

In the paper

“The VWFA hypothesis was framed in the broader context of recent studies of functional specialization within the human ventral visual stream, in which have been identified several areas specialized for other classes of visual stimuli such as faces, places, or body parts (Downing et al., 2001; Hasson et al., 2003; Haxby et al., 2001; Kanwisher et al., 1997).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Downing et al., 2001 source
• Not checked yetcites Hasson et al., 2003 source
• Not checked yetcites Haxby et al., 2001 source

In the paper

“It is possible that the overlap is merely due to the coexistence of distinct, functionally unrelated circuits within approximately the same region.”

In the paper

“In particularly, within the visual system, we claim that whenever subjects read a word, a reproducible portion of the left occipitotemporal sulcus is activated and hosts functionally specialized circuits for letter and word recognition.”

In the paper

“The word superiority effect is the fact that when asked to detect the presence of a letter, subjects typically show superior performance when the letter is embedded in a visual string that respects the structure of the learned language than when it is embedded in a random string.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Reicher, 1969 source

In the paper

“Rather, the density of neurons activated during reading probably varies continuously, though nonrandomly, across the surface of the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, thus creating a landscape of local preference for various categories of objects (Hasson et al., 2002; Haxby et al., 2001).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Hasson et al., 2002 source
• Not checked yetcites Haxby et al., 2001 source

In the paper

“The issue of the nature of the contribution of a given cortical sector to reading (e.g. Is it caseindependent? Is it location-invariant? Does it code for single letters, or for graphemes, syllables, or morphemes?) can be addressed completely independently of the orthogonal issue of whether neurons in this cortical sector also contribute to object or face recognition.”

In the paper

“All in all, both computational arguments and experimental psychological data point to specialization for visual word recognition in skilled readers.”

In the paper

“This phenomenon, which is found with real words, pseudo-words (Spoehr and Smith, 1975), and even nonwords sufficiently similar to words such as SPCT (Rumelhart and McClelland, 1982), implies the existence of a mechanism tuned to the possible structures of visual words.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Spoehr and Smith, 1975
• Not checked yetcites Rumelhart and McClelland, 1982

In the paper

“Rather, reading poses particular problems to the visual system, some of which (such as case invariance) are specific to reading in a given script.”

In the paper

“There may be columns of neurons specialized for the recognition of letters, graphemes, or words, but they are likely to be intermixed with other neurons involved in object and face recognition (Puce et al., 1999).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Puce et al., 1999 source

In the paper

“Those results suggest that posterior inferotemporal activations during auditory word processing are optional and contingent on the engagement of the subject in orthographic processing.”

In the paper

“To demonstrate functional specialization in the VWFA, one should exhibit a pattern of activation that cannot be reduced to generic visual processes, but necessarily reflects regularities of the writing system.”

In the paper

“High-resolution single-subject studies are needed to evaluate the claim that the very same region is activated in both cases.”

In the paper

“It is likely that, as our ability to image this region evolves, more subdivisions will appear within what we currently think of as a single VWFA.”

In the paper

“This indicates clearly that this region is not a supramodal area and is not automatically activated during auditory word processing.”

In the paper

“More frequently, pure alexic patients show relatively preserved, albeit slow, letter identification abilities and resort to letter-by-letter reading strategies (for references, see Montant and Behrmann, 2000).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Montant and Behrmann, 2000

In the paper

“This indicates that processing in the VWFA goes beyond generic processes of size and location normalization, and is capable of establishing the arbitrary links between upperand lower-case letters.”

In the paper

“Although it appears slightly more anterior than the VWFA, methodological differences in the reconstruction of lesions may be sufficient to account for this discrepancy.”

In the paper

“Similarly, a few cases of alexia restricted to the RVF have been reported, and may be due to left intrahemispheric lesions deafferenting the VWFA but sparing low-level visual regions (Castro-Caldas and Salgado, 1984).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Castro-Caldas and Salgado, 1984

In the paper

“One lesion was a haemorrhage large enough to cause 1 month of coma, and the other one was an invasive temporoparietal glioma which had been evolving for several years, and there is no evidence that the fusiform was spared.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Warrington and Shallice, 1980

In the paper

“Thus, although the precision of the correlations should still be improved, there is good convergence towards the site of the VWFA as the anatomical correlate of pure alexia.”

In the paper

“To take but one example, Beversdorf et al. (1997) report a case with a limited surgical excision and demonstrative postmortem data.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Beversdorf et al., 1997

In the paper

“This clinical pattern thus reflects (1) the loss of fast and parallel letter perception mechanisms and (2) in severe cases, the loss of single letter identification abilities.”

In the paper

“Our hypothesis implies that pure alexia should result either from a disruption of the VWFA itself, or from impaired projections to or from this system.”

In the paper

“Actually, the extent of the patients' lesions was not reported in any detail, and the fusiform gyrus may well have been affected.”

In the paper

“This holds quite generally, at least in passive viewing conditions or with tasks that require equal attention to words and to consonant strings; no difference, or even a reversal, can be observed if the task is more difficult to perform with consonant strings than with words (Cohen et al., 2003).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Cohen et al., 2003 source

In the paper

“IT neurons are able to learn new arbitrary shapes (Logothetis et al., 1995), and arbitrary pairings of stimuli (Sakai and Miyashita, 1991), which might be an analogue of learning letters and of linking arbitrarily related upper- and lowercase letters.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Logothetis et al., 1995 source
• Not checked yetcites Sakai and Miyashita, 1991 source

In the paper

“One should keep in mind that this picture results from imaging methods with limited resolution (several millimeters) and may change as one becomes able to visualize or record from small cortical patches, columns, or even single neurons.”

In the paper

“The region that activates to visual words is well delimited and occupies a fixed location relative to other regions that preferentially respond to faces, houses, or objects (Hasson et al., 2002, 2003; Puce et al., 1996).”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Hasson et al., 2002, 2003
• Not checked yetcites Puce et al., 1996 source

In the paper

“However, she could accurately discriminate real letters from visually equivalent pseudo-letters, as well as normally oriented letters from mirror-reversed letters.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Miozzo and Caramazza, 1998

In the paper

“We claim that this constitutes sufficient evidence to label this region the visual word form area, even if at present the evidence for the third type of cortical specialization (regional selectivity) is not definitive.”

In the paper

“Finally, it should be remembered that it takes years for children to develop expert word recognition (Aghababian and Nazir, 2000), and that the emergence of this expertise correlates with the amount of activation of the VWFA by letter strings in normal and dyslexic children (McCandliss et al., 2003; Shaywitz et al., 2002; Temple, 2002).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Aghababian and Nazir, 2000
• Not checked yetcites McCandliss et al., 2003 source
• Not checked yetcites Shaywitz et al., 2002 source

In the paper

“This suggests a loss of abstract orthographic knowledge, with preservation of a basic familiarity with individual letter shapes.”

In the paper

“Rather, they reflect the breakdown of the functional specialization incorporated during the acquisition of literacy, including knowledge of the finite set of characters, the links between upper- and lower-case letters, and the organization in arbitrary subsets of symbols such as letters and digits.”

In the paper

“As to the left lateralization of the VWFA, it may result from interhemispheric differences in the processing of spatial frequencies (Kitterle and Selig, 1991) or in the invariant vs. token-specific coding of visual objects (Burgund and Marsolek, 1997).”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Kitterle and Selig, 1991
• Not checked yetcites Burgund and Marsolek, 1997

In the paper

“The 5400 years that have elapsed since its invention are too short to permit the evolution of dedicated biological mechanisms for learning to read.”

In the paper

“Neurophysiological and optical imaging methods indicate a high degree of local cortical specialization in inferotemporal (IT) neurons (Tanaka, 1996), with columnar clustering of cells with similar selectivity.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Tanaka, 1996 source

In the paper

“There is thus no ready-made ''module'' for visual word recognition, but a progressive specialization process that capitalizes on the plasticity of the human ventral inferotemporal cortex to build the VWFA.”

In the paper

“Thus, the evidence to date favors a model of partially distributed and overlapping representation of visual categories (Haxby et al., 2000, 2001), with a landscape of partial but not absolute preferences across the ventral cortical surface.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Haxby et al., 2000, 2001

In the paper

“The lateralization may also imply preferential connections to lefthemispheric language areas.”

In the paper

“Psychological, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging data converge to suggest that the human brain of literate subjects contains specialized mechanisms for visual word recognition (functional specialization), which map in a systematic way onto the properties of a cortical subregion of the left posterior occipitotemporal sulcus (reproducible localization).”

In the paper

“They also observed that whenever the distractors were digits or simple geometrical shapes, the patient could easily match lower- and upper-case letters, or pick out a printed letter named by the examiner, although these tasks were severely impaired when the distractors were other letters.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Chanoine et al., 1998 source

In the paper

“For instance, the patient studied by Miozzo and Caramazza (1998) was severely impaired at naming single letters, and she was unable to decide whether an upper- and lower-case letter had the same name or not.”

What the sources say

• Not checked yetcites Miozzo and Caramazza, 1998