Temporal Pole (Area 38)

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Temporal Pole (Area 38)

Main Text

Location and Boundaries

Location

• Most rostral portion of temporal lobes
• Present only in humans and nonhuman primates

Boundaries

• Rostral: Perirhinal cortex
• Lateral: Amygdala

Function

Multimodal Sensory/Emotional Integration

• Temporal pole combines multimodal sensory representations with emotive input from orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala

Face Recognition and Social Processing

• Facial recognition regions in fusiform face area, inferior temporal, superior temporal sulcus, and temporal pole
• Hypothesized that temporal pole adds emotive information to facial recognition

Theory of Mind

• Temporal pole activation across broad range of studies involved in mentalizing, imagining mental states of others

Memory

• Right temporal pole more associated with emotion and social memory, left temporal pole with semantic memory and facial naming
• Activation can be associated with false memories

Complex Object Naming

• Represented bilaterally in temporal poles

Structural Connections

Orbitofrontal Cortex and Amygdala

• Mediated by uncinate fasciculus

Basal Forebrain and Hypothalamus

• Similar to other paralimbic regions

Multimodal Sensory Cortex

• Reciprocal connections to auditory (areas 41 and 42), visual (area 17, 18, and 19), somatosensory (areas 1, 2, and 3), and olfactory association cortices

Insula

• Particularly ventral insula (area 13)

Functional Connections

Coactive Regions

• Medial temporal lobe, superior temporal gyrus (area 22), superior temporal sulcus, lateral inferior frontal gyrus (areas 44, 45, and 47), superior parietal cortex (areas 5 and 7), extrastriate visual cortex
• Functional connectivity and task-based fMRI are often unreliable in temporal poles because of susceptibility artifact

Associated Literature Keywords (NeuroSynth)

• Self-referential, scenarios, story, memories, conceptual, self, thinking, theory of mind, person, perspective, concepts, videos, social, retrieval, attribution

Area 38-Associated Disorders

Traumatic Brain Injury

• Temporal poles commonly contused in closed head injury

Semantic Dementia

• Atrophy and hypometabolism of ventral rostral temporal lobe, especially temporal poles, usually asymmetric
• Right anterior temporal involvement most associated with socioemotional dysregulation

Klüver-Bucy Syndrome

• Diminished fear, hyperorality, hypersexuality, blunted affect
• Can result from bilateral amygdala, orbitofrontal, and temporal pole cortex lesions

Neurosurgery

• Anterior temporal poles often removed in temporal lobectomy, injured by retraction in aneurysm clipping

Image Gallery

Print Images

TEMPORAL POLE: LOCATION AND COACTIVATION

Coronal and axial slices show the relative position of temporal pole area 38 (data source: WFU PickAtlas).

Coactivation map of Brodmann area 38 shows brain regions that reliably activate with the centroid of voxels lying within area 38 in over 4,000 studies from the NeuroSynth database. This image is the average of left and right coactivation maps.

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Tags: Imaging Anatomy Brain and Spine

Mar 13, 2021 | Posted by admin in NUCLEAR MEDICINE | Comments Off

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