ReviewFrontiers in human neuroscience2023
Beyond the Visual Word Form Area - a cognitive characterization of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex.
Review in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Spatiotemporal Dynamics in Prespeech Semantic Category Decoding: An Intracranial EEG Study.eNeuro · 2026Article
- Examining the Cerebral-Cerebellar Connectivity During Spelling Tasks.Cerebellum (London, England) · 2026Article
- A Matter of Font: Visual Word Form Area Responses to Brand Names Are More Sensitive to Font Than to Letter Case Changes.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Functional Specialization of the Visual Word Form Area During Word Reading: A Multimodal Neuroimaging Study.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Mimed speech as an intermediary state between overt and imagined speech production in an electrocorticography study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia as a model for understanding the cognitive and cerebral determinants of verbal creativity.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Article
- Distinct neural representations of different linguistic components following sign language learning.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Demystifying visual word form area visual and nonvisual response properties with precision fMRI.iScience · 2024Article
- Music literacy shapes the specialization of a right hemispheric word reading area.Neuroimage. Reports · 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
- Visual word processing engages a hierarchical, distributed, and bilateral cortical network.iScience · 2024Article
- The role of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex in speech processing-The influence of visual deprivation.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex has been traditionally viewed as a pathway for visual object recognition including written letters and words. Its crucial role in reading was strengthened by the studies on the functionally localized "Visual Word Form Area" responsible for processing word-like information. However, in the past 20 years, empirical studies have challenged the assumptions of this brain region as processing exclusively visual or even orthographic stimuli. In this review, we aimed to present the development of understanding of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex from the visually based letter area to the modality-independent symbolic language related region. We discuss theoretical and empirical research that includes orthographic, phonological, and semantic properties of language. Existing results showed that involvement of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex is not limited to unimodal activity but also includes multimodal processes. The idea of the integrative nature of this region is supported by the broad functional and structural connectivity with language-related and attentional brain networks. We conclude that although the function of the area is not yet fully understood in human cognition, its role goes beyond visual word form processing. The left ventral occipitotemporal cortex seems to be crucial for combining higher-level language information with abstract forms that convey meaning independently of modality.
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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.