ReviewBrain structure & function2021
Anatomy and physiology of word-selective visual cortex: from visual features to lexical processing.
Review in Brain structure & function, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- 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
- EEG activities and connectivities associated with surtitle presentation during live opera viewing: an exploratory analysis of cognitive absorption.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- 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
- Functional Specialization of the Visual Word Form Area During Word Reading: A Multimodal Neuroimaging Study.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- The balance between stability and plasticity of the visual word form area in dyslexia.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Multimodal investigation of the neurocognitive deficits underlying dyslexia in adulthood.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Neural Distinction between Visual Word and Object Recognition: An fMRI Study Using Pictographs.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Abnormal topological properties and functional-structural coupling of large-scale brain networks in primary angle-closure glaucoma.Quantitative imaging in medicine and surgery · 2025Article
- Contributions of the multiple demand network to emergent and skilled reading.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Hippocampal and cortical oscillatory dynamics reflect semantic processing and predict behavioural performance.The Journal of physiology · 2025Article
- White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity and category-selectivity from birth.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity, and category-selectivity from birth.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
- Development of the arcuate fasciculus is linked to learning gains in reading.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Demystifying visual word form area visual and nonvisual response properties with precision fMRI.iScience · 2024Article
- White matter associations with spelling performance.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Both mOTS-words and pOTS-words prefer emoji stimuli over text stimuli during a lexical judgment task.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Over the past 2 decades, researchers have tried to uncover how the human brain can extract linguistic information from a sequence of visual symbols. The description of how the brain's visual system processes words and enables reading has improved with the progressive refinement of experimental methodologies and neuroimaging techniques. This review provides a brief overview of this research journey. We start by describing classical models of object recognition in non-human primates, which represent the foundation for many of the early models of visual word recognition in humans. We then review functional neuroimaging studies investigating the word-selective regions in visual cortex. This research led to the differentiation of highly specialized areas, which are involved in the analysis of different aspects of written language. We then consider the corresponding anatomical measurements and provide a description of the main white matter pathways carrying neural signals crucial to word recognition. Finally, in an attempt to integrate structural, functional, and electrophysiological findings, we propose a view of visual word recognition, accounting for spatial and temporal facets of word-selective neural processes. This multi-modal perspective on the neural circuitry of literacy highlights the relevance of a posterior-anterior differentiation in ventral occipitotemporal cortex for visual processing of written language and lexical features. It also highlights unanswered questions that can guide us towards future research directions. Bridging measures of brain structure and function will help us reach a more precise understanding of the transformation from vision to language.
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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.