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STUDIES of primates¹ and of patients with brain lesions² have shown that the visual system represents the external world in regions and pathways specialized to compute visual features and attributes. For example, object recognition is performed by a ventral pathway located in the inferior portion of the temporal lobe³. We studied visual processing of words and word-like stimuli (letter-strings) by recording field potentials directly from the human inferior temporal lobe. Our results showed that two discrete portions of the fusiform gyrus responded preferentially to letter-strings. A region of the posterior fusiform gyrus responded equally to words and non-words, and was unaffected by the semantic context in which words were presented. In contrast, a region of the anterior fusiform gyrus was sensitive to these stimulus dimensions. These regions were distinct from areas that responded to other types of complex visual …