The DOI matches its Crossref record; 79 of the 79 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Reading normal and degraded words: Contribution of the dorsal and ventral visual pathways.
Abstract
Fast, parallel word recognition, in expert readers, relies on sectors of the left ventral occipito-temporal pathway collectively known as the visual word form area. This expertise is thought to arise from perceptual learning mechanisms that extract informative features from the input strings. The perceptual expertise hypothesis leads to two predictions: (1) parallel word recognition, based on the ventral visual system, should be limited to words displayed in a familiar format (foveal horizontal words with normally spaced letters); (2) words displayed in formats outside this field of expertise should be read serially, under supervision of dorsal parietal attention systems. We presented adult readers with words that were progressively degraded in three different ways (word rotation, letter spacing, and displacement to the visual periphery). Behaviorally, we identified degradation thresholds above which reading difficulty increased non-linearly, with the concomitant emergence of a word length effect on reading latencies reflecting serial reading strategies. fMRI activations were correlated with reading difficulty in bilateral occipito-temporal and parietal regions, reflecting the strategies required to identify degraded words. A core region of the intraparietal cortex was engaged in all modes of degradation. Furthermore, in the ventral pathway, word degradation led to an amplification of activation in the posterior visual word form area, at a level thought to encode single letters. We also found an effect of word length restricted to highly degraded words in bilateral occipitoparietal regions. Those results clarify when and how the ventral parallel visual word form system needs to be supplemented by the deployment of dorsal serial reading strategies.
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“In bilateral PPC (Cohen et al., 2008; Vinckier et al., 2006), we found increasing responses to word visibility (Supplementary Figure 4).”
From The Development of Cortical Sensitivity to Visual Word Forms (2011) · cites this paper as Cohen et al., 2008
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A default mode of brain function
Raichle, M. E., MacLeod, A. M., Snyder, A. Z., Powers, W. J., Gusnard, D. A., & Shulman, G. L. (2001) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.98.2.676 · Cited by 12,190
DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud.
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.108.1.204 · Cited by 4,500
A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming.
Seidenberg, M. S., & McClelland, J. L. (1989) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.96.4.523 · Cited by 3,909
Hierarchical models of object recognition in cortex
Riesenhuber, M., & Poggio, T. (1999) · Nature Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/14819 · Cited by 3,309
Cohen, L., Dehaene, S., Naccache, L., Lehéricy, S., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Hénaff, M.-A., & Michel, F. (2000) · Brain · doi:10.1093/brain/123.2.291 · Cited by 1,954
Self-citationThe visual word form area: expertise for reading in the fusiform gyrus
McCandliss, B. D., Cohen, L., & Dehaene, S. (2003) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00134-7 · Cited by 1,489
Self-citationLanguage‐specific tuning of visual cortex? Functional properties of the Visual Word Form Area
Cohen, L., Lehéricy, S., Chochon, F., Lemer, C., Rivaud, S., & Dehaene, S. (2002) · Brain · doi:10.1093/brain/awf094 · Cited by 1,254 · cited 1×
“20) (Cohen et al., 2002), left inferior frontal cortex/insula, and left precentral sulcus with an extension into dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.”
BackgroundSelf-citationThe neural code for written words: a proposal
Dehaene, S., Cohen, L., Sigman, M., & Vinckier, F. (2005) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.05.004 · Cited by 1,201
Self-citationMesulam, M.-M. (1999) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.1999.0482 · Cited by 1,096
A Parametric Manipulation of Factors Affecting Task-induced Deactivation in Functional Neuroimaging
McKiernan, K. A., Kaufman, J. N., Kucera-Thompson, J., & Binder, J. R. (2003) · Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience · doi:10.1162/089892903321593117 · Cited by 1,080
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Fernández‐López, M., Romero-Ortells, I., Marcet, A., Labusch, M., & Perea, M. (2026) · Language Cognition and Neuroscience · doi:10.1080/23273798.2026.2701846
“This is consistent with the built-in noise tolerance assumed for letter detectors (Cohen et al., 2008).”
Lirola, R.-M., Bara, F., Paubel, P., Guillet, F., Frey, A., Gilhodes, J.-C., Velay, J., & Danna, J. (2026) · Reading and Writing · doi:10.1007/s11145-026-10886-2
Veronelli, L., Daini, R., Primativo, S., Toneatto, C., Ghielmi, L., Pino, S., Gilardone, G., Martelli, M., & Arduino, L. S. (2026) · Frontiers in Psychology · doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1911950
“On the other hand, in normal conditions (i.e., without a visual-perceptual deficit and CD), progressively increased spacing between letters may alter the stored visual word form, interfering with the process of visual recognition of words (Cohen et al., 2008) and reading.”
Metadata
- Authors
- Cohen, L., Dehaene, S., Vinckier, F., Jobert, A., & Montavont, A.
- Affiliations
- Inserm (FR)
- Corresponding author
- Cohen, Laurent
- Venue
- NeuroImage
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2008-03-01
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 353-366
- ISSN
- 1053-8119 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2034546135
- Cited by
- 303
- References
- 79
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 19 · 2018: 16 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 27 · 2014: 21 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 30
- FWCI
- 17.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- NeuroImage (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Reading and Literacy Development
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Keywords
- visual word recognition, visual word form area, dorsal visual pathway, ventral stream, perceptual expertise, intraparietal cortex, letter spacing, visual periphery, word length effect, reading latency
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Attention, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Nerve Net, Occipital Lobe, Orientation, Parietal Lobe, Photic Stimulation, Reading, Temporal Lobe, Visual Pathways, Recognition, Psychology
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