Clutter does not affect the spatial tuning of * category representations in human object-selective cortex *

Natural vision is frequently impaired when the visual field is crowded with multiple competing objects. One common interpretation of this clutter interference is that it originates from the large, position-tolerant receptive fields found in high-level visual cortex, which hinder the isolation of a target from its spatial surround. One way the visual system might counteract this interference is by relying on more localized object representations that are less prone to interference from objects at other locations and that are known to be prevalent also in higher-level visual cortex. If object encoding under clutter indeed uses more localized representations, then classifiers trained to recognize objects from one region of the visual field should generalize less well to other regions of the visual field in the presence of clutter compared to isolated objects. Here we tested this by measuring participants' brain signals with fMRI while they viewed objects presented either alone or within cluttered arrays. Consistent with prior work, category decoding accuracy was significantly reduced in clutter. However, we found that even classifiers trained directly on cluttered arrays generalize robustly across spatial positions, comparable to classifiers trained on isolated objects. This finding challenges the idea that clutter preferentially disrupts position-tolerant representations.