Abstract
Evidence suggests the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) plays an important role in person identification and memory. In humans, neuroimaging studies of person memory report consistent activations in the ATL to famous and personally familiar faces and studies of patients report resection or damage of the ATL causes an associative prosopagnosia in which face perception is intact but face memory is compromised. In addition, high-resolution fMRI studies of non-human primates and electrophysiological studies of humans also suggest regions of the ventral ATL are sensitive to novel faces. The current study extends previous findings by investigating whether similar subregions in the dorsal, ventral, lateral, or polar aspects of the ATL are sensitive to personally familiar, famous, and novel faces. We present the results of two studies of person memory: a meta-analysis of existing fMRI studies and an empirical fMRI study using optimized imaging parameters. Both studies showed left-lateralized ATL activations to familiar individuals while novel faces activated the right ATL. Activations to famous faces were quite ventral, similar to what has been reported in previous high-resolution fMRI studies of non-human primates. These findings suggest that face memory-sensitive patches in the human ATL are in the ventral/polar ATL.
Highlights
Personally known and famous faces are often used interchangeably as “familiar” faces, there are distinct differences between them, which have implications on a theoretical and neural level
The goal of the present study was to investigate two questions in order to learn more about the sensitivity of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) to faces: (1) Are the same ATL subregions sensitive to personally familiar, famous, and novel faces? (2) Are the face-sensitive subregions of the ATL localized to dorsal, ventral, lateral, or polar aspects of the ATL? To answer these questions we qualitatively compared the results of our activation likelihood method (ALE) meta-analysis of face familiarity to the findings www.frontiersin.org from our empirical fMRI study using famous, personally familiar, and unfamiliar faces
We were interested in whether ATL activations to different categories of faces were present in the ventral ATL, similar to what has been reported in monkeys using novel and familiar faces
Summary
Personally known and famous faces are often used interchangeably as “familiar” faces, there are distinct differences between them, which have implications on a theoretical and neural level. FMRI studies of person memory have most commonly contrasted famous faces to unfamiliar faces and one of the most consistently reported activations is in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL); see Leveroni et al, 2000; Henson et al, 2003; Gobbini et al, 2004; Eger et al, 2005; Elfgren et al, 2006; Tsukiura et al, 2008; Trinkler et al, 2009; Brambati et al, 2010; Nielson et al, 2010; Ramon et al, 2010; Barense et al, 2011; Cloutier et al, 2011; Gesierich et al, 2011; Ross and Olson, 2011; Sugiura et al, 2011. Left-lateralized lesions of the ATL tended to affect lexical aspects of person memory, such as recollection of names, while right-lateralized lesions tended to affect feelings of familiarity and processing and retrieval of biographical information
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