ArticleCurrent biology : CB2023
Engaging in word recognition elicits highly specific modulations in visual cortex.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Simultaneous Cortical Responses to Multiple Written Words.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Context-dependent reconfiguration of functional connectivity in posterior (VWFA-1) and anterior (VWFA-2) visual word form area under attentional and linguistic demands.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2026Article
- A large-scale heterogeneous 3D magnetic resonance brain imaging dataset for self-supervised learning.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Simultaneous cortical responses to multiple written words.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The Emergence of Topography and Hemispheric Lateralization in High-Level Vision.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2026Review
- 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
- Lexical Representations in the Common and Specific Neural Networks for Visual, Phonological, and Semantic Processing in Chinese Reading.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Recurrence affects the geometry of visual representations across the ventral visual stream in the human brain.PLoS biology · 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
- Flickering lenses enhance reading performance through placebo effect.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Memorability of novel words correlates with anterior fusiform activity during reading.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Intracerebral Electrical Stimulation of the Left Occipito-Temporal Cortex Induces Pure Alexia.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Separating feedforward and feedback dynamics using time-frequency resolved connectivity: A hybrid model of left ventral occipitotemporal cortex in word reading.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Demystifying visual word form area visual and nonvisual response properties with precision fMRI.iScience · 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
- Article
- Reading reshapes stimulus selectivity in the visual word form area.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Early life stress, literacy and dyslexia: an evolutionary perspective.Brain structure & function · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
A person's cognitive state determines how their brain responds to visual stimuli. The most common such effect is a response enhancement when stimuli are task relevant and attended rather than ignored. In this fMRI study, we report a surprising twist on such attention effects in the visual word form area (VWFA), a region that plays a key role in reading. We presented participants with strings of letters and visually similar shapes, which were either relevant for a specific task (lexical decision or gap localization) or ignored (during a fixation dot color task). In the VWFA, the enhancement of responses to attended stimuli occurred only for letter strings, whereas non-letter shapes evoked smaller responses when attended than when ignored. The enhancement of VWFA activity was accompanied by strengthened functional connectivity with higher-level language regions. These task-dependent modulations of response magnitude and functional connectivity were specific to the VWFA and absent in the rest of visual cortex. We suggest that language regions send targeted excitatory feedback into the VWFA only when the observer is trying to read. This feedback enables the discrimination of familiar and nonsense words and is distinct from generic effects of visual attention.
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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.