期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2015
卷号：112
期号：4
页码：E351-E360
DOI：10.1073/pnas.1415146112
语种：English
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：SignificanceOur visual world is richly decorated with a great variety of textures, but the brain mechanisms underlying texture perception remain poorly understood. Here we studied the selectivity of neurons in visual area V4 of macaque monkey with synthetic textures having known combinations of higher-order image statistics. We found that V4 neurons typically respond best to particular sparse combinations of these statistics. We also found that population responses of texture-selective V4 neurons can explain human texture discrimination and categorization. Because the statistics of each image can be computed from responses of upstream neurons in visual area V1, our results provide a clear account of how the visual system processes local image features to create the global perception of texture in natural images. 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.
关键词：texture perception ; material perception ; visual area V4 ; single-cell recording ; image analysis
