A matter of font: Visual word form area responses to brand names are more sensitive to font than to letter case changes

Lexical access to common words is remarkably robust to changes in surface format (e.g., font, case, color, size), supporting abstractionist models in which orthographic codes are largely invariant to perceptual details. However, recent behavioral experiments have shown that brand names, a type of lexical item that is typically encountered in a highly consistent visual format, are sensitive to modifications of surface format (Perea et al., 2022; Labusch et al., 2024a). This research has largely focused on behavioral measures, leaving open questions about the neural mechanisms underlying brand name recognition. Here, we used fMRI to examine whether the visual word form area (VWFA) and related regions are sensitive to font and letter case modifications in brand names in a semantic categorization task (brand related to transportation or not). Participants viewed brand names presented either in their typical visual format, or with a modified font or case. Font modifications slowed responses and elicited increased VWFA activation relative to intact logos, whereas case modifications also slowed responses but did not reliably modulate activity in the canonical VWFA ROI. This dissociation constrains strong claims of strict format invariance in the VWFA, while remaining compatible with hierarchical or interactive accounts in which some ventral occipitotemporal populations retain sensitivity to learned surface forms. Rather than supporting a categorical claim of case invariance, the present data indicate stronger sensitivity to font than to letter case when a perceptual format is consistently tied to lexical identity.