What is the visual word form area encoding? An adaptation study contrasting handwriting with word identity
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neuroimaging studies have shown that when subjects view written words, there is activation in the fusiform gyrus, more on the left than on the right, in an area called the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA). In patients, lesions of the left medial occipitotemporal cortex are associated with alexia, whereas lesions of the right medial occipitotemporal cortex are found in some prosopagnosic patients, some of whom also have problems identifying handwriting. These observations suggest that encoding handwriting from written material may occur in the right fusiform cortex, whereas encoding word forms may occur in the left fusiform cortex. To test these hypotheses, we performed an fMRI adaptation experiment in 11 subjects. Functional localizers, one using a contrast between faces and objects and another using a contrast between English and Korean words identified the right fusiform face area (FFA) and the bilateral VWFA respectively. The adaptation run was a block-design consisting of three different experimental conditions; one containing different words in different handwriting, a second containing the same word in different handwriting, and a third containing different words in the same handwriting. Contrary to expectations, we found a significant adaptation for handwriting (p[[lt]].021) but not for word identity in the left VWFA, and a trend to adaptation for handwriting (p[[lt]].065) but not word identity in the right VWFA. No significant adaptation effects were found in the right FFA. These findings raise questions about whether the VWFA encodes word forms invariant of the script in which they are written. Rather than this invariance, they show a sensitivity of the VWFA to script form that is independent of word form.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it