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Structure and function of neural circuit related to gloss perception in the macaque inferior temporal cortex: a case report

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Abstract

The inferior temporal (IT) cortex of the macaque monkey plays a pivotal role in the visual recognition of objects. In the IT cortex, a feature-selective network formed by connecting subregions specialized for common visual features seems to be a basic strategy for processing biologically important visual features. Gloss perception plays an important role in the judgment of materials and conditions of objects and is a biologically significant visual function. In the present study, we attempted to determine whether a neural circuit specialized for processing information related to gloss perception exists in the IT cortex in one monkey. We injected retrograde tracer into a gloss-selective subregion in the IT cortex where gloss-selective neurons were clustered in the neural recording experiment, and anatomically examined its neural connections. We observed that retrogradely labeled neurons were densely accumulated in multiple locations in the posterior and anterior IT cortices. Based on the results of this case study, we will discuss the possibility that, together with the injection site, the sites with a dense cluster of labeled neurons form feature-selective neural circuits for the processing of gloss information in the IT cortex.

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Reproduced with permission from Fig. 2A of Okazawa et al. 2012)

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Data used in the present study can be made available upon request to the primary contact author.

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Code used in the study can be requested by emailing the primary contact author.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank I. Yokoi, M. Takagi, N. Takahashi, and T. Ota for technical assistance with the monkey treatment and the entire experiment.

Funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 22135007, 17H00892, and 15H05916 (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas "Shitsukan" and "Innovative SHITSUKAN Science and Technology") and 20H05955 (Grant-in-Aid for Transformative Research Areas (A)　“Deep Shitsukan”) to H.K, 16K21587 (Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)) to A.N.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University, Tamagawagakuen 6-1-1, Machida, Tokyo, 194-8610, Japan

    Hidehiko Komatsu

  2. National Institute for Physiological Sciences, Aichi, Japan

    Hidehiko Komatsu, Akiko Nishio & Naokazu Goda

  3. National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, National Institute of Neuroscience, Kodaira, Japan

    Noritaka Ichinohe

Authors
  1. Hidehiko Komatsu
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  2. Akiko Nishio
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  3. Noritaka Ichinohe
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  4. Naokazu Goda
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Correspondence to Hidehiko Komatsu.

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Ethical statement

All procedures for animal care and experimentation were performed in accordance with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (1996) and were approved by our institutional animal experimentation committee.

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There are no relevant financial or non-financial conflicts of interest among the authors to disclose.

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Komatsu, H., Nishio, A., Ichinohe, N. et al. Structure and function of neural circuit related to gloss perception in the macaque inferior temporal cortex: a case report. Brain Struct Funct 226, 3023–3030 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02324-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-021-02324-6

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