The visual word form area (VWFA) has been consistently identified as a crucial structure in visual word processing. Nevertheless, it is controversial whether the VWFA represents external visual information (e.g., case information) of visual words. To address that question, we functionally localized VWFA at the group level (gVWFA) and at the individual level (iVWFA), and used multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to explore the information representation in the VWFA during an implicit reading task (i.e., a passive viewing task). Univariate activation analysis revealed that participants showed stronger activations for uppercase English words compared to lowercase ones in the VWFA. MVPA further revealed that the classifier trained based on lowercase words versus letter strings significantly distinguished uppercase words versus letter strings in the iVWFA, while that trained based on lowercase words versus uppercase words distinguished lowercase letter strings versus uppercase letter strings neither in the gVWFA nor in the iVWFA. These results suggest that the VWFA does not represent case information, but represents case-independent linguistic information. Our findings elaborate the function in the VWFA and support the VWFA hypothesis.

视觉单词形式区域（VWFA）已被一致确定为视觉单词处理中的关键结构。然而，VWFA是否代表视觉单词的外部视觉信息（例如，案例信息）存在争议。为了解决该问题，我们在功能上将VWFA定位在组级别（gVWFA）和个人级别（iVWFA），并使用多变量模式分析（MVPA）在隐性阅读任务（即被动观看任务）。单变量激活分析表明，与VWFA中的小写字母相比，参与者对大写英语单词的激活更强。MVPA进一步显示，在iVWFA中，基于小写单词与字母字符串训练的分类器显着区分了大写单词与字母字符串，而在gVWFA和gVWFA中，基于小写单词与大写单词训练的分类器都不区分小写字母字符串与大写字母字符串。 iVWFA。这些结果表明，VWFA不代表案例信息，而是代表不区分大小写的语言信息。我们的发现详细说明了VWFA中的功能并支持VWFA假设。但代表不区分大小写的语言信息。我们的发现详细说明了VWFA中的功能并支持VWFA假设。但代表不区分大小写的语言信息。我们的发现详细说明了VWFA中的功能并支持VWFA假设。