Object Familiarity in LOC

Hundreds of studies have explored the Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC), which is critical for shape perception. In a pair of papers, we measured LOC responses to four categories of stimuli: familiar objects, novel objects constructed by rearranging the parts of the familiar objects, scattered objects in which the parts were no longer touching, and a pixel-scrambled control condition. Our findings suggest that LOC is sensitive to inter-part relations, but not necessarily to object familiarity.