Evidence for rapid localist plasticity in the ventral visual stream: the example of words

Our recent work has shown that the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left occipitotemporal cortex contains an orthographic lexicon based on neuronal representations highly selective for individual written real words (RWs) and that learning novel words selectively increases neural specificity in the VWFA. But, how quickly does this change in neural tuning occur and how much training is required for new words to be codified in the VWFA? Here, we present evidence that plasticity in the VWFA from broad to tight tuning can be obtained in a short time span, with no explicit training, and with comparatively few exposures, further strengthening the case for a highly plastic visual lexicon in the VWFA and for localist representations in the visual processing hierarchy.