‘‘What’ ’ and ‘‘Where’ ’ in Word Reading: Ventral Coding of Written Words Revealed by Parietal Atrophy Abstract

Abstract

& The visual system of literate adults develops a remarkable perceptual expertise for printed words. To delineate the aspects of this competence intrinsic to the occipitotemporal ‘‘what’ ’ pathway, we studied a patient with bilateral lesions of the occipitoparietal ‘‘where’ ’ pathway. Depending on critical geometric features of the display (rotation angle, letter spacing, mirror reversal, etc.), she switched from a good performance, when her intact ventral pathway was sufficient to encode words, to severely impaired reading, when her parietal lesions prevented the use of alternative reading strategies as a result of spatial and attentional impairments. In particular, reading was disrupted (a) by rotating word by more than 508, providing an approximation of the invariance range for words encodin