Twelve neurologically normal right-handed subjects were asked to remember thelocations of eight representational drawings, presented one at a time, together with twolandmarks (white squares), on a computer screen. Subjects were then scanned using positronemission tomography (PET) while performing forced-choice recognition of object location infour conditions, using either the original landmarks or two of the other objects as cues. In twoconditions, the absolute location of the objects was unchanged from the time of encoding(fixed-array conditions), whereas in the other two, the location of the objects was shifted,although the spatial relationship among the objects and landmarks was maintained (shifted-arrayconditions). Subjects were also scanned in a control condition that made the same perceptual andmotor demands as the recognition tasks but that had no mnemonic component. Compared to thecontrol condition, all of the recognition tasks activated both the dorsal and ventral visualpathways bilaterally, but with notable asymmetries. In particular, activation in the right, but notleft, inferior temporal gyrus (area 37) was observed when both shifted-array conditions werecompared to their respective cue-matched fixed-array conditions. The recognition conditionswith landmark cues were associated with focal increases in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF)in the region of the right parahippocampal gyrus. The results support previous reports ofinvolvement of the right mesial temporal region in object-location memory tasks, and suggestthat right inferotemporal cortex is involved in extracting the invariant relational features of avisual scene.