ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Emergence of a compositional neural code for written words: Recycling of a convolutional neural network for reading.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- Motor abstraction training generalizes to the refinement of specific movement patterns.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Self-supervised learning yields representational signatures of category-selective cortex.Communications biology · 2026Article
- 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
- Emergence of a temporal processing gradient from naturalistic inputs and network connectivity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
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- Neural signatures of automatic letter-speech sound integration in literate adults.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Beyond Letters: Optimal Transport as a Model for Sub-Letter Orthographic Processing.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- 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
- The neuroconnectionist research programme.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2023Review
- Does the visual word form area split in bilingual readers? A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study.Science advances · 2023Article
- Graph theoretical analysis reveals the functional role of the left ventral occipito-temporal cortex in speech processing.Scientific reports · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region of human inferotemporal cortex that emerges at a fixed location in the occipitotemporal cortex during reading acquisition and systematically responds to written words in literate individuals. According to the neuronal recycling hypothesis, this region arises through the repurposing, for letter recognition, of a subpart of the ventral visual pathway initially involved in face and object recognition. Furthermore, according to the biased connectivity hypothesis, its reproducible localization is due to preexisting connections from this subregion to areas involved in spoken-language processing. Here, we evaluate those hypotheses in an explicit computational model. We trained a deep convolutional neural network of the ventral visual pathway, first to categorize pictures and then to recognize written words invariantly for case, font, and size. We show that the model can account for many properties of the VWFA, particularly when a subset of units possesses a biased connectivity to word output units. The network develops a sparse, invariant representation of written words, based on a restricted set of reading-selective units. Their activation mimics several properties of the VWFA, and their lesioning causes a reading-specific deficit. The model predicts that, in literate brains, written words are encoded by a compositional neural code with neurons tuned either to individual letters and their ordinal position relative to word start or word ending or to pairs of letters (bigrams).
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