Human lateral occipital complex is invariant for position and size transformations at the single-neuron level

Object recognition relies on neural invariance to changes in position and size, yet the underlying mechanisms in humans remain uncertain due to the challenges that accompany single-unit recordings in cortical areas. We conducted the first single-unit recordings investigating position and size invariance in the human lateral occipital complex (LO) using two microelectrode arrays implanted in distinct LO subregions of a single patient. Our findings reveal that LO neurons exhibit strong shape tuning. Receptive fields were smaller than previously reported in literature. Time-resolved correlational analyses and multidimensional scaling confirmed robust position invariance and size invariance for changes up to 2 octaves, mirroring properties of the macaque inferotemporal cortex. These results advance our understanding of LO's critical role in visual processing and object recognition.