greater activation in controls than in dyslexics on reading tasks was precisely the left inferior temporal region, exactly at the junction between lateral and mesial aspects of the temporal lobe. It is noteworthy that this region is ideally located to serve as an interface between areas associated with processing visual features of written words (especially the more mesial extrastriate cortex), other temporo-occipital regions involved in complex visual processing (including the motion area which is in close vicinity), and more dorsal language areas in the middle and superior temporal gyri, possibly subserving grapheme-to-phoneme transformation. One plausible role which could be attributed to this crucial region could be that of mediating the visual entry into the linguistic system, combining orthographic, lexical and phonological information about words. Unpublished observations show that this region also activates with stimuli given in the auditory modality when subjects have to perform an orthographic computation on the heard words. Such data are also compatible with this formulation. Finally, the same region has been found activated with Japanese kanji characters, suggesting that its role is probably more orthographic than phonologic ( Uchida et al ., 1999 ). fMRI study of motion perception in dyslexia By reference to theories based on psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence of a deficit in the magnocellular component of the visual pathways, Eden and colleagues designed an fMRI experiment contrasting two visual conditions that differentially activate the magnosystem and the parvosystem ( Eden et al ., 1996 a ). The experimental condition (M-stimulus) consisted of a