Left mid-ventral temporal cortex interacts with early visual cortex and the anterior temporal lobe to support word individuation

The left mid-ventral temporal cortex (lmVTC) plays a dynamic role in reading. In this study we investigated the neural interactions that influence lmVTC dynamics and the lexical information these interactions are dependent on. We monitored activity with either intracranial electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography while participants viewed real words, pseudowords, consonant strings, and false fonts. A coarse level representation in early lmVTC activity allowed for decoding of visually dissimilar real words, pseudowords, and false fonts. Functional interactions between anterior ventral temporal regions, possibly containing stored knowledge about words, and low-order visual regions occurred after this initial stage of processing and was followed by the individuation of orthographically similar real words in lmVTC, but not similar pseudowords, letter strings, or false fonts. These results suggest that the individuation of real word representations in lmVTC is catalyzed by stored knowledge about word forms that emerges from network-level interactions with anterior regions of the temporal lobe.