Functional Specialization of the Visual Word Form Area During Word Reading: A Multimodal Neuroimaging Study

Abstract The visual word form area (VWFA) has been consistently identified as a crucial structure in word reading, and its function differs across subregions. Nevertheless, the functional roles of its subregions and their functional origins remain controversial. Here, we adopted multimodal neuroimaging techniques (i.e., task-state fMRI, resting-state fMRI, and diffusion MRI) combined with representational similarity analysis to investigate the functional role of VWFA subregions and the brain circuitry supporting their function in two experiments. Results revealed respective roles of the posterior and anterior VWFA subregions in visual and semantic processing, which is consistent with their respective connectivity to orthographic and semantic networks. In addition, processing demands modulated the neural representations of high-level linguistic information in the VWFAs. These convergent findings elucidated the local neural computations in the VWFAs and their cooperative mechanism with distant brain regions related to language processing, jointly providing multimodal neuroimaging evidence for the connectivity-biased hypothesis.