, 2008 and Freeman et al., 2011). For an active observer in the natural world, objects are fundamentally physical entities. As such, an intrinsic but surprisingly overlooked property of any object is its real-world

size (Konkle and Oliva, 2011). The size of objects in the world has consequences for both the nature of the objects and our experiences with them. For example, gravity and the laws of physics impose specific constrains on the shape and material properties of objects of different sizes. If an object R428 nmr is simply scaled up in size, the increased weight per unit surface area will cause objects with insufficient material strength to collapse, and many natural objects tend to have optimized proportions that are neither overly strong or weak for their size (Haldane, 1928 and Gordan, 1981). Additionally, the physical size of objects in the world dictates how we interact with them: we pick up small objects like strawberries and paperclips, but we sit in and move around large objects like sofas and fountains. Thus different-sized objects have different action demands and typical interaction distances. Given these constraints of the physical world on the properties of objects and how we experience them, we hypothesized that object representations may be naturally differentiated by their real-world size, reflected in a coarse

spatial organization across occipitotemporal selleck chemical cortex. In the current study, we compared the cortical response to big and small real-world objects. We specifically focused on the representations of everyday inanimate these objects, excluding faces, bodies, animals, and classically defined tools. These everyday objects often get grouped together as “other objects” (e.g., see Hasson et al., 2003 and Op de Beeck et al., 2008) and are known to have a distributed activation

pattern across a large swath of ventral-temporal cortex. Here, we examined whether voxels along this cortex showed a preference for objects of big or small real-world sizes. One possibility is that big and small object preferences would be weak and heterogeneously distributed, in a “salt-and-pepper” organization that is not consistent across people. Instead, we observe that there are strong differential responses to big and small objects, and these preferences are grouped spatially in a medial-to-lateral arrangement across the ventral surface of cortex. This organization of object information is mirrored along the lateral surface, with an inferior-to-superior arrangement of small-to-big object information. Within this organization, we find reliable spatially clustered regions that show peaks of differential selectivity to big and small objects, evident at the single-subject level. We thus characterized the responses in these new functional regions-of-interest to examine the nature of the object representations.