Processing of visual textures in the mouse visual cortex

Visual textures efficiently represent real-world information that is essential for perceptual tasks like pattern detection, object segmentation and classification. This information appears to be encoded in intermediate areas along the primate ventral visual stream (areas V2-V4), but how textural selectivity emerges at the circuit level, and whether the neural architectures that support texture processing are shared across mammalian species is currently unknown. We addressed these questions in the mouse by first examining the mouse’s perceptual ability to discriminate higher order texture statistics, and then by studying the neural substrate of texture processing along the ventral visual stream. We employed a new model to synthesize textures using convolutional neural networks pretrained for object recognition, and in addition we generated spectrally matched stimuli (scrambles) which shared the same low-order features as the textures. Mice could be trained to behaviorally discriminate textures from scrambles across different texture families. We then studied the neural underpinning of texture encoding in primary (V1) and secondary (LM) visual cortices by performing widefield and 2-photon GCaMP imaging. Both at the population and single cell level we observed that V1 and LM differentially responded to the textures compared to the scrambles, with response modulation in LM being higher than in V1. To examine whether these area differences were driven by the higher-order statistical features of texture stimuli, we trained a linear encoder model to predict responses of individual cells using the texture statistics as features. Overall, the model better captured the neural responses in LM than in V1, with larger weights associated with higher-order image statistics in area LM. In summary, our results provide evidence for texture vision in the mouse with a neural underpinning sharing encoding characteristics with the primate ventral visual stream, thus suggesting preserved neural principles for texture processing across mammalian species.