Toward Understanding Neural Substrates of Material and Shitsukan Recognition

Abstract

In our daily life, we easily recognize the material composition of an object, and experience a variety of feelings/impressions about its material properties and qualities (‘Shitsukan'). In recent years, neuroscience researche has delved into how the brain extracts visual features that are diagnostic of material composition from a complicated real-world image, such as those representing reflection characteristics and micro/meso-scale three-dimensional structure (texture) of the surface, and how such features are integrated and utilized for recognizing the material category and the shitsukan. In addition, there is now a growing interest in the multimodal nature of the shitsukan, and its neural basis. This review aims to outline the recent progress in the field of neuroscience about these new issues, in particular, the representation and transformation of the visual features to the shitsukan through a hierarchical/parallel network in the visual cortex.