The visual world is richly adorned with texture, which can serve to delineate important elements of natural scenes. In anesthetized macaque monkeys, selectivity for the statistical features of natural texture is weak in V1, but substantial in V2, suggesting that neuronal activity in V2 might directly support texture perception. To test this, we investigated the relation between single cell activity in macaque V1 and V2 and simultaneously measured behavioral judgments of texture. We generated stimuli along a continuum between naturalistic texture and phase-randomized noise and trained two macaque monkeys to judge whether a sample texture more closely resembled one or the other extreme. Analysis of responses revealed that individual V1 and V2 neurons carried much less information about texture naturalness than behavioral reports. However, the sensitivity of V2 neurons, especially those preferring naturalistic textures, was significantly closer to that of behavior compared with V1. The firing of both V1 and V2 neurons predicted perceptual choices in response to repeated presentations of the same ambiguous stimulus in one monkey, despite low individual neural sensitivity. However, neither population predicted choice in the second monkey. We conclude that neural responses supporting texture perception likely continue to develop downstream of V2. Further, combined with neural data recorded while the same two monkeys performed an orientation discrimination task, our results demonstrate that choice-correlated neural activity in early sensory cortex is unstable across observers and tasks, untethered from neuronal sensitivity, and therefore unlikely to directly reflect the formation of perceptual decisions.

视觉世界装饰着丰富的纹理，可以用来描绘自然场景的重要元素。在麻醉的猕猴中，V1 对自然纹理统计特征的选择性较弱，但在 V2 中很大，这表明 V2 中的神经元活动可能直接支持纹理感知。为了测试这一点，我们研究了猕猴 V1 和 V2 中单细胞活性之间的关系，并同时测量了质地的行为判断。我们沿着自然纹理和相位随机噪声之间的连续体生成刺激，并训练两只猕猴判断样本纹理是否更接近一个或另一个极端。对反应的分析表明，与行为报告相比，单个 V1 和 V2 神经元携带的有关纹理自然度的信息要少得多。然而，与 V1 相比，V2 神经元的敏感性，尤其是那些喜欢自然纹理的神经元，明显更接近行为的敏感性。尽管个体神经敏感性较低，但 V1 和 V2 神经元的放电预测了一只猴子对重复呈现相同模棱两可刺激的感知选择。然而，两个种群都没有预测到第二只猴子的选择。我们得出结论，支持纹理感知的神经反应可能会在 V2 的下游继续发展。此外，结合相同的两只猴子执行方向辨别任务时记录的神经数据，我们的结果表明，早期感觉皮层中的选择相关神经活动在观察者和任务之间不稳定，不受神经元敏感性的束缚，因此不太可能直接反映知觉决策的形成。