Vassiki Chauhan¹, Alex White¹; ¹Barnard College, Columbia University

The visual word form area (VWFA), within the left occipitotemporal cortex, is known to be critical for reading. We have learned much about this region’s function by recording responses to single words. But when we read, we typically see multiple words simultaneously. We don’t know how the VWFA’s activity changes with the number of words being read, and whether the representation of each word might be affected by neighboring words. Here, we fill that gap by varying the number of words presented, while holding visual stimulation constant. We adapted the “simultaneous suppression” paradigm, which has shown that in other visual areas, the response to multiple stimuli presented simultaneously is smaller than the sum of responses to the same stimuli presented sequentially. Participants viewed rapid sequences of three frames (total duration = 700 ms). Each frame contained two character strings, one above and one below fixation. Most of those were unfamiliar pseudoletters with visual features matched to words in Courier New. There were four conditions: (1) Zero words; (2) One English word appearing at one position; (3) Two words presented sequentially (at different positions in different frames); (4) Two words presented simultaneously (in the same frame). We recorded activity with fMRI while 22 participants viewed these stimuli and reported how many words they perceived in each trial. The VWFA’s response magnitude increased linearly with the number of words presented. The response did not significantly differ between the sequential and simultaneous two-word conditions, although participants performed worse at detecting two simultaneous words. Moreover, across all conditions, the BOLD response varied with the lexical frequency of each word, including for both of the two words presented simultaneously. In sum, the VWFA’s activity scales with the number of words presented, and it is sensitive to the lexical properties of two words presented simultaneously.