Position coding in the visual word form area

摘要

How does our brain achieve its impressive expertise to effortlessly read written words? It has been proposed that a key element of the capability to recognize visually presented words (as well as other objects) is a normalization process that is assumed to operate along the visual hierarchy. This normalization process would remove varying aspects of presented words from the evoked retinal representations in the eye and early visual cortex, including spatial position, size, and rotation, resulting in standardized (invariant) representations in higher-level visual areas (Fig. 1A and B).