ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Parallel spatial channels converge at a bottleneck in anterior word-selective cortex.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reading instruction causes changes in category-selective visual cortex.Brain research bulletin · 2024Trial
- Can bilingual readers process language membership of multiple words in parallel?Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Simultaneous Cortical Responses to Multiple Written Words.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Anatomy of the Visual Word Form Area in Dyslexia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- The reading brain - Transforming vision into language.Progress in neurobiology · 2026Review
- Simultaneous cortical responses to multiple written words.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Similarities (and Differences) in the Learning Patterns of Single-Word Reading of an Alphabetic Orthography in Monolingual and Bilingual Primary School Children: A Cross-Sectional Study.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Negative effects of redundant targets.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2026Article
- The Emergence of Topography and Hemispheric Lateralization in High-Level Vision.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Review
- The Nature of Noise Modulates Readers' Inferences for Transposition Errors of Reversible Words in Chinese Sentences.Journal of psycholinguistic research · 2025Article
- The balance between stability and plasticity of the visual word form area in dyslexia.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Neural representation of mixed feelings during real-time processing of negative words in pun-humor.Communications biology · 2025Article
- The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Memorability of novel words correlates with anterior fusiform activity during reading.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Individual variation in the functional lateralization of human ventral temporal cortex: Local competition and long-range coupling.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Intracerebral Electrical Stimulation of the Left Occipito-Temporal Cortex Induces Pure Alexia.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Demystifying visual word form area visual and nonvisual response properties with precision fMRI.iScience · 2024Article
- The Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing during At-a-Glance Reading.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
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Abstract
In most environments, the visual system is confronted with many relevant objects simultaneously. That is especially true during reading. However, behavioral data demonstrate that a serial bottleneck prevents recognition of more than one word at a time. We used fMRI to investigate how parallel spatial channels of visual processing converge into a serial bottleneck for word recognition. Participants viewed pairs of words presented simultaneously. We found that retinotopic cortex processed the two words in parallel spatial channels, one in each contralateral hemisphere. Responses were higher for attended than for ignored words but were not reduced when attention was divided. We then analyzed two word-selective regions along the occipitotemporal sulcus (OTS) of both hemispheres (subregions of the visual word form area, VWFA). Unlike retinotopic regions, each word-selective region responded to words on both sides of fixation. Nonetheless, a single region in the left hemisphere (posterior OTS) contained spatial channels for both hemifields that were independently modulated by selective attention. Thus, the left posterior VWFA supports parallel processing of multiple words. In contrast, activity in a more anterior word-selective region in the left hemisphere (mid OTS) was consistent with a single channel, showing (
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.