Fig. 4.

Left: Top view of MNI152 brain template with a cutout over the left occipital temporal sulcus (OTS) at the level of z = −12. Right: Spatial representations of VWFA coordinates reported in a sample of fMRI papers examining different types of stimulus contrasts in adults (Ben-Shachar et al. 2007; Stevens et al. 2017; López-Barroso et al. 2020). Contrasts were categorized as “lexical” when different types of text stimuli were compared (LEX e.g., words vs letter strings, words vs false fonts, words vs pseudowords; as in Lerma-Usabiaga et al. 2018). Contrasts were considered “orthographic/lexical” (i.e., text-selective) when text stimuli were compared with non-text controls (ORT/LEX e.g., letters vs rest, words vs symbol strings, words vs chequerboards, words vs. scrambled word images). While the VWFA coordinates of lexical contrasts cluster in more anterior portions of VOTC, the coordinates of orthographic/lexical contrasts cover a wider spatial range and extend further posterior. This spatial variability might be associated with the processing of both lexical and perceptual features that are relevant when comparing text with non-linguistic material. Interestingly, two of the abovementioned studies that used an “orthographic/lexical” contrast (marked in dark green) specifically reported two distinct VWFA foci that could be distinguished on the posterior-anterior axis (Hasson et al. 2002; White et al. 2019b). Additional VWFA coordinates can be added to the table available at https://github.com/SendyCaffarra/VWFA_coordinates/tree/main and the figure can be reproduced and updated using the available code.