Brief encounters with real objects modulate medial parietal but not occipitotemporal cortex

Humans are skilled at recognizing everyday objects from pictures, even if we have never encountered the depicted object in real life. But if we have encountered an object, how does that real-world experience affect the representation of its photographic image in the human brain? We developed a paradigm that involved brief real-world exploration of everyday objects prior to the measurement of brain activity with fMRI while viewing pictures of the objects. We discovered that while object-responsive regions in lateral occipital and ventral temporal cortex were visually driven and contained highly invariant representations of specific objects, those representations were not modulated by real-world exploration. However, real-world experience with an object produced foci of increased activation in medial parietal and posterior cingulate cortex, identifying an important associative region for the experience gained from manual object exploration. The richness of object representations beyond their photographic image has important implications for understanding object recognition in both the human brain and in computational models.