Table 3.

Studies on functional outcome/recovery of word recognition in patients with a lesion to the higher-order visual cortex

Study	Subject	Etiology	Lesion/resection	Onset	Surgery	Test	Vision/language test	Outcome
O’Hare et al. (1998)	N/A	Haemophilus influenzae meningitis	Bilateral occipital lobe infarction	2.5y	No surgery	Multiple tests between 2-10y	Low-level vision: visual acuity, visual fields High-level vision: Face: face matching32, familiar face identification Object: picture and drawing identification Reading: letter and number identification	Low-level vision: gradual recovery of acuity left lower-quadrantanopia, impaired depth perception High-level vision: Face: prosopagnosia Object: object agnosia Reading: pure alexia with spared recognition of letters and numbers Other aspects: some degree of topographic agnosia
Cohen et al. (2004)	N/A	Sturge-Weber angioma, focal seizures	Left occipitotemporal resection	4y	5y	11y	Low-level vision: N/A High-level vision: Face: N/A Object: N/A Reading: spoken and written language production and comprehension fMRI: speech processing (auditory), word reading (visual)	Low-level vision: N/A High-level vision/cognition: Face: N/A Object: N/A Reading: Normal reading abilities supported by right VWFA despite a strong left lateralization of all other language-related activations (Broca's area, superior temporal sulcus, inferior parietal lobule)
Danelli et al. (2013)	EB	A massive expanding process through the left frontal-insular area (diagnostic suspicion of a large cavernous angioma)	Left hemispherectomy	2y 6m	2y 6m	Multiple tests between 14-17y	Low-level vision: visual acuity, visual fields, line orientation test33 High-level vision: Face: Facial Recognition Task34 Object: Birmingham Object Recognition Battery35 Language: phoneme discrimination test36, non-word repetition test37, Test for the Reception of Grammar38, the Token Test39, etc. Reading: Sartori et al. (1995)40 battery, visual lexical decision task, visual homophone discrimination task, etc. fMRI: (i) automatic word generation (ii) phonemic and semantic word fluency (iii) word listening (iv) plausibility decision task on sentences (v) word and non-word reading	Low-level vision: homonymous right hemianopia, absence of stereopsis, normal orientation perception High-level vision/cognition: Face: normal range Object: normal range Language: near-to-normal language production and comprehension Reading: below normal level in visual lexical decision task and visual homophone discrimination task, despite normal reading accuracy and speed fMRI: Activation in the right language network conforms to a left-like linguistic neural blueprint The right VWFA activation was not specific to reading