RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Neural Coding for Shape and Texture in Macaque Area V4
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 4760
OP 4774
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3073-18.2019
VO 39
IS 24
A1 Taekjun Kim
A1 Wyeth Bair
A1 Anitha Pasupathy
YR 2019
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/39/24/4760.abstract
AB The distinct visual sensations of shape and texture have been studied separately in cortex; therefore, it remains unknown whether separate neuronal populations encode each of these properties or one population carries a joint encoding. We directly compared shape and texture selectivity of individual V4 neurons in awake macaques (1 male, 1 female) and found that V4 neurons lie along a continuum from strong tuning for boundary curvature of shapes to strong tuning for perceptual dimensions of texture. Among neurons tuned to both attributes, tuning for shape and texture were largely separable, with the latter delayed by ∼30 ms. We also found that shape stimuli typically evoked stronger, more selective responses than did texture patches, regardless of whether the latter were contained within or extended beyond the receptive field. These results suggest that there are separate specializations in mid-level cortical processing for visual attributes of shape and texture.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Object recognition depends on our ability to see both the shape of the boundaries of objects and properties of their surfaces. However, neuroscientists have never before examined how shape and texture are linked together in mid-level visual cortex. In this study, we used systematically designed sets of simple shapes and texture patches to probe the responses of individual neurons in the primate visual cortex. Our results provide the first evidence that some cortical neurons specialize in processing shape whereas others specialize in processing textures. Most neurons lie between the ends of this continuum, and in these neurons we find that shape and texture encoding are largely independent.