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Description: Humans are remarkably proficient at finding objects within a complex visual world. Current theories of attentional selection propose that this ability is mediated by target-specific preparatory activity in visual cortex, biasing visual processing in favor of the target object. In real-world situations, however, the visual input that any object will produce is unknown in advance; its size, for instance, varies dramatically with the object’s distance from the observer. Using fMRI, we show that preparatory activity is systematically modulated by expectations derived from scene context. Human participants searched for objects at different distances in scenes. Activity patterns in object-selective cortex during search preparation (while no object was presented), resembled activity patterns evoked by viewing the target object in isolation. Crucially, this preparatory activity was modulated by distance, reflecting the predicted size of the object at each distance. These findings reconcile current theories of attentional selection with the challenges of real-world vision.