Fig. 1.

Increased house-evoked activity in PPA when simultaneously presented object distracters are positioned according to real-world regularities. (A) In each display, two house stimuli were surrounded by a total of eight object pairs. The configurations of the objects were either regular (Left) or irregular (Right) relative to their real-world configurations. (B) Attentional competition was manipulated by either presenting the houses and the surrounding pairs simultaneously for 500 ms, followed by a 500-ms blank screen, or sequentially, for 500 ms each. (C) Location of right-hemispheric PPA and LO in a representative participant. (D) When houses and object pairs were presented simultaneously (SIM), house-selective PPA showed stronger responses when the object pairs were positioned according to real-world regularities than when they were not, indicating reduced attentional competition. No such difference was observed in the absence of competition between houses and objects—when houses and object pairs were presented sequentially (SEQ). (E) In contrast to house-selective PPA, responses in object-selective LO were not modulated by pair configuration.