The intrinsic cortical geometry of reading

Reading involves dual streams of sensory propagation that lie within a broader sensory-to-transmodal hierarchy. This study explores whether individual differences in this functional organization can be explained by cortical geometry. Through a modified connectome predictive modeling approach, we identified cortical distances (CD) measured along the cortical surface that predict reading performance. We found that interindividual variation in CD robustly predicts reading performance comparably to functional connectivity (FC). Moreover, combining CD and FC outperforms single-modality models, indicating that these measures offer complementary perspectives of cortical organization. Notably, the geodesic distances that drive our predictions align with the spatial layout of the dual-route hypothesis of reading. We note that within these streams, reading performance is predicted by shorter distances between the visual cortex and higher-order transmodal regions. We thus show how the geometry underlying reading supports an emerging hypothesis that individual differences in cortical geometry shape how we think and act.