ArticleeLife2020
A compositional neural code in high-level visual cortex can explain jumbled word reading.
Article in eLife, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 55 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
- Letter Distortion Mapping in Amblyopia: Spatial Patterns, Stability, and Relationship to Visual Acuity.Investigative ophthalmology & visual science · 2025Article
- From retinotopic to ordinal coding: Dissecting the cortical stages of visual word recognition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Direction-selective laterodorsal thalamic nucleus encodes optic flow and turning in spatial navigation.Neuron · 2025Article
- Article
- Visual homogeneity computations in the brain enable solving property-based visual tasks.eLife · 2025Article
- Beyond Letters: Optimal Transport as a Model for Sub-Letter Orthographic Processing.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Touch to text: Spatiotemporal evolution of braille letter representations in blind readers.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Cracking the neural code for word recognition in convolutional neural networks.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Investigating lexical categorization in reading based on joint diagnostic and training approaches for language learners.NPJ science of learning · 2024Article
- One more trip to Barcetona: on the special status of visual similarity effects in city names.Psychological research · 2024Article
- Does word flickering improve reading? Negative evidence from four experiments using low and high frequencies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Dimensionality and Ramping: Signatures of Sentence Integration in the Dynamics of Brains and Deep Language Models.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Reading about a RELO-VUTION.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Visual and haptic cues in processing occlusion.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Letter processing in upright bigrams predicts reading fluency variations in children.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2022Article
- Are brand names special words? Letter visual-similarity affects the identification of brand names, but not common words.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2022Article
- Using compositionality to understand parts in whole objects.The European journal of neuroscience · 2022Review
- The lexical categorization model: A computational model of left ventral occipito-temporal cortex activation in visual word recognition.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- A separable neural code in monkey IT enables perfect CAPTCHA decoding.Journal of neurophysiology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We read jubmled wrods effortlessly, but the neural correlates of this remarkable ability remain poorly understood. We hypothesized that viewing a jumbled word activates a visual representation that is compared to known words. To test this hypothesis, we devised a purely visual model in which neurons tuned to letter shape respond to longer strings in a compositional manner by linearly summing letter responses. We found that dissimilarities between letter strings in this model can explain human performance on visual search, and responses to jumbled words in word reading tasks. Brain imaging revealed that viewing a string activates this letter-based code in the lateral occipital (LO) region and that subsequent comparisons to stored words are consistent with activations of the visual word form area (VWFA). Thus, a compositional neural code potentially contributes to efficient reading.
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Registered trials
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.