{"pk":26486,"title":"Modeling the Visual Word Form Area Using a Deep Convolutional NeuralNetwork","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The visual word form area (VWFA) is a region of the cortex lo-cated in the left fusiform gyrus, that appears to be a waystationin the reading pathway. The discovery of the VWFA occurredin the late twentieth century with the advancement of func-tional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Since then, therehas been an increasing number of neuroimaging studies to un-derstand the VWFA, and there are disagreements as to its prop-erties. One such disagreement is regarding whether or not theVWFA is more selective for real words over pseudowords1. Arecent study using fMRI adaptation (Glezer, et al., 2009) pro-vided evidence that neurons in the VWFA are selectively tunedto real words. This contradicts the hypothesis that the VWFAis tuned to the sublexical structure of visual words, and there-fore has no preference for real words over pseudowords. Inthis paper, we develop a realistic model of the VWFA by train-ing a deep convolutional neural network to map printed wordsto their labels. The network is able to achieve an accuracy of98.5% on the test set. We then analyze this network to see ifit can account for the data Glezer et al. found for words andpseudowords, and find that it does.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0pn4n283","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Sandy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wiraatmadja","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California San Diego","department":""},{"first_name":"Garrison","middle_name":"W.","last_name":"Cottrell","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of California San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26486/galley/16122/download/"}]}