Neural Coding of Written Words in the Visual Word Form Area
Stanislas Dehaene, Laurent Cohen · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2010
The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, after a brief consideration of the major computational problems that must be resolved by the visual stages of reading, it reviews the evidence for or against the hypothesis that part of the left inferotemporal cortex functions as a specialized “visual word form area” in literate adults. Second, assuming that this area does indeed contain neurons that have become attuned to visual word recognition, it asks how these neurons might be organized. Considering that word recognition probably arises from a minimal “recycling” of the preexisting visual object recognition system, the chapter presents a hypothetical model, according to which a hierarchy of local combination detector (LCD) neurons, inspired from the known architecture of the primate inferotemporal cortex, collectively implement an invariant neural code for written words.