title: Image statistics underlying natural texture selectivity of neurons in macaque V4.
abstract: Our daily visual experiences are inevitably linked to recognizing the rich variety of textures. However, how the brain encodes and differentiates a plethora of natural textures remains poorly understood. Here, we show that many neurons in macaque V4 selectively encode sparse combinations of higher-order image statistics to represent natural textures. We systematically explored neural selectivity in a high-dimensional texture space by combining texture synthesis and efficient-sampling techniques. This yielded parameterized models for individual texture-selective neurons. The models provided parsimonious but powerful predictors for each neuron's preferred textures using a sparse combination of image statistics. As a whole population, the neuronal tuning was distributed in a way suitable for categorizing textures and quantitatively predicts human ability to discriminate textures. Together, we suggest that the collective representation of visual image statistics in V4 plays a key role in organizing the natural texture perception.
authors.affiliation: Division of Sensory and Cognitive Information, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan; okazawagouki@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Gouki
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Okazawa
authors.affiliation: RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Chiyoda, Tokyo 102-0082, Japan; and.
authors.forename: Satohiro
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tajima
authors.affiliation: Division of Sensory and Cognitive Information, National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan; Department of Physiological Sciences, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan.
authors.forename: Hidehiko
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Komatsu
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008251:Macaca; D009474:Neurons / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: image analysis; material perception; single-cell recording; texture perception; visual area V4