• Chengrou Lu, Huiling Li, Ruilin Fu, Jing Qu, Qingxin Yue, and Leilei Mei.
• Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, China; School of Psychology, South China Normal University, 510631 Guangzhou, China; Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, 510631 Guangzhou, China; Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, 510631 Guangzhou, China.
• Neuroscience. 2021 Jan 1; 452: 49-62.

AbstractThe visual word form area (VWFA) has been consistently identified as a crucial structure in visual word processing. Nevertheless, it is controversial whether the VWFA represents external visual information (e.g., case information) of visual words. To address that question, we functionally localized VWFA at the group level (gVWFA) and at the individual level (iVWFA), and used multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to explore the information representation in the VWFA during an implicit reading task (i.e., a passive viewing task). Univariate activation analysis revealed that participants showed stronger activations for uppercase English words compared to lowercase ones in the VWFA. MVPA further revealed that the classifier trained based on lowercase words versus letter strings significantly distinguished uppercase words versus letter strings in the iVWFA, while that trained based on lowercase words versus uppercase words distinguished lowercase letter strings versus uppercase letter strings neither in the gVWFA nor in the iVWFA. These results suggest that the VWFA does not represent case information, but represents case-independent linguistic information. Our findings elaborate the function in the VWFA and support the VWFA hypothesis.Copyright © 2020 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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