Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability.

Jamie L Mitchell, Mia Jimenez, Hannah L Stone, Maya Yablonski, Jason D Yeatman

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Article in Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

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1 citing paper in PubMed.

Anatomy of the Visual Word Form Area in Dyslexia.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026
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Visual Word Form Area demonstrates individual and task-agnostic consistency but inter-individual variability.2025

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

5 authors.

Jamie L MitchellGraduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA. Electronic address: jamiel12@stanford.edu.

Mia JimenezGraduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

Hannah L StoneDepartment of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Baraba, CA, USA.

Maya YablonskiGraduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics,Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.

Jason D YeatmanGraduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics,Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Ventral Occipital Temporal Cortex (VOTC) contains a mosaic of categorically-selective functional regions that respond to visual stimuli. Within left VOTC lies the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) - a text-selective region that develops as individuals learn to read. While there is consistency in the general location of text-selective responses - within the posterior occipitotemporal sulcus (OTS) - there is substantial variability across individuals in the size and precise anatomical location. Moreover, debate continues regarding whether VWFA a) encodes the visual features of text, versus b) is driven by the task of reading. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned adults and children as they completed two tasks while viewing text, pseudo fonts, faces, objects, limbs: (1) a fixation task where participants ignored stimuli while making psychophysical judgements on a fixation dot, and (2) a one-back task, where they attend to stimuli to detect repeats. We found a consistent VWFA location could be identified on each individual's cortical surface using either task. At the same time, the one-back task evoked a larger territory of text-selective response (leading to a larger ROI) than the fixation task. However, when averaged in template space, text-selective cortex could not be identified due to variability in the relative locations of text-, face-, object-, and limb-selective cortex. Thus, despite task-agnostic consistency in individual VWFA, text-selective responses are masked when averaged in template space due to variability in the exact configuration of category-selective regions. Furthermore, we demonstrate these effects are consistent across development.

Indexed as

Occipital LobePattern Recognition, VisualReadingTemporal LobeAdolescentAdultBrain MappingChildFemaleHumansIndividualityMagnetic Resonance ImagingMalePhotic StimulationYoung AdultCategory selectivityFMRIFunctional organizationIndividual differencesVentral occipitotemporal cortexVisual word form area

Identifiers

PMID41791266

DOI10.1016/j.dcn.2026.101703

PMCPMC12993163

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND

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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.