ИСТИНА

Background: There is a large amount of data on the role of areas of the ventral visual cortex in processing information about various stimulus characteristics. However, there are various contradictions in the data on the role of hV4, VO1, and VO2 areas in processing information about color and shape. Methods: To investigate the role of hV4, VO1 and VO2 areas of the human ventral visual cortex in working memory, we used 60-channel EEG and evoked potentials recording to calculate cortical activity while participants performed a delayed color/shape discrimination task. The activity of the ventral visual cortex areas was calculated in Brainstorm (Tadel et al., 2011) using the dSPM algorithm (Dale et al., 2001). The coordinates of area boundaries were determined from the visual cortex atlas (Wang et al., 2014). The presentation sequence was the same as in the experiment (Harrison & Tong, 2009), but as the stimuli we used complex shapes like a blot; 8 shapes and 9 color variants (Kozlovskiy & Rogachev, 2021). In each trial, subjects (N=10, 5 females, mean age = 21.5±0.7) were presented sequentially at random with two stimuli that they were required to recall. The cue was then presented as a number (1 or 2) in a circle, a square, or both a circle and a square, which tasked one of these images (1 or 2) to recall and retain in working memory color, shape, or color and shape simultaneously. Then, after a delay of 2000 ms, a test stimulus was presented and the subject had to answer whether the characteristic held in working memory coincided with the same characteristic in the test stimulus. Results: We found activation peaks during recall and retention of shape or color and shape stimulus in areas VO1 and VO2 of the right hemisphere at latencies of 400-600 ms. In the right hemisphere area hV4 at the same latency, activation in recalling and holding in memory the color or color and shape of the stimulus was observed. Conclusions: These results seem to indicate different involvement of the ventral visual cortex areas in the retention in working memory of the color and configurative characteristics of the stimulus. The right hV4 area is more related to color retention, while the right hemisphere areas VO1 and VO2 are more related to stimulus shape retention.