Abstract
Surface gloss affects the appearance of objects and provides an important information for object recognition. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms related to the perception of gloss. To address this issue, we tested responses of the inferior temporal (IT) neurons to the stimuli which have various surface gloss while a monkey was performing a visual fixation task. We found that there exist neurons that selectively responded to specific range of gloss in IT cortex of the monkey (Nishio et al. 2012). These gloss selective neurons systematically changed their responses in the perceptual gloss space. Furthermore, we found that a set of perceptual gloss parameters as well as surface albedo can be well explained by the population activities of gloss selective neurons, and it is likely that these parameters are coded by the gloss selective neurons in this area to represent a variety of gloss (Nishio et al. 2014). These results suggest that the IT cortex represents perceptual gloss space.
