Demystifying the Visual Word Form Area: Precision fMRI of Visual, Linguistic, and Attentional Properties of Ventral Temporal Cortex

After more than three decades of investigation, the nature and even the existence of the visual word form area (VWFA), a region in left ventrotemporal cortex (VTC), is still under debate. Here we provide novel insight on this debate by using precision fMRI to compare the VWFA to adjacent VTC regions, amodal language, and multiple-demand networks. We find that the VWFA is unique in its word-selectivity within VTC. The VWFA also uniquely shows auditory language-selectivity, but this language responsiveness is dwarfed by i) its visual-selectivity even to non-preferred stimuli and ii) language-selectivity of the language network. We additionally identify a region at the tip of the VTC which prefers auditory language to visual stimuli. Finally, almost all VTC fROIs are modulated by attention, not just the VWFA. We propose that the VWFA primarily operates as a visual look-up dictionary of orthographic information, presumably facilitated through connections with canonical language cortex.