Famous People Knowledge and the Right and Left Temporal Lobes

Julie S Snowden,Jennifer C Thompson,David Neary

doi:10.1155/2012/360965

Julie S Snowden, Jennifer C Thompson + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/360965

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Abstract

It is generally accepted that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge of famous people. The specific roles of the right and left temporal lobe remain a subject of debate, with some studies suggesting differential roles based on modality (visual versus verbal information) and others category (person knowledge versus general semantics). The present study re-examined performance of semantic dementia patients with predominantly right and predominantly left temporal lobe atrophy on famous face, famous name and general semantic tasks, with the specific aim of testing the hypothesis that the right temporal lobe has a privileged role for person knowledge and the left temporal lobe for general semantic knowledge. Comparisons of performance rankings across tasks showed no evidence to support this hypothesis. By contrast, there was robust evidence from naming, identification and familiarity measures for modality effects: right-sided atrophy being associated with relatively greater impairment for faces and visual tasks and left-sided atrophy for names and verbal tasks. A double dissociation in test scores in two patients reinforced these findings. The data present a challenge for the influential ‘semantic hub’ model, which views the anterior temporal lobes as an area of convergence in which semantic information is represented in amodal form.

Highlights

There is good evidence that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge about famous people
The study was motivated by current debate regarding the role of the anterior temporal lobes and in particular by putative differential roles of the left and right temporal lobe
The study examined whether there is evidence from semantic dementia (SD) patients for a privileged role of the right temporal lobe in the representation of personknowledge as opposed to general semantic knowledge, as suggested by Thompson et al [43]

Summary

Introduction

There is good evidence that the anterior temporal lobes support knowledge about famous people. Impairments in recognising and naming famous people have been demonstrated in patients with temporal lobe lesions and following temporal lobe resection [4,10,45, 46]. Famous faces have been shown to elicit activation in the anterior temporal lobes in functional imaging studies [3,11,35,42,47]. A compelling source of evidence comes from patients with semantic dementia (SD) [14,15,38,39,40], a degenerative disorder of the anterior temporal lobes that is associated with severe, multimodal loss of concep∗ Corresponding author: Professor Julie S. A ubiquitous and striking early feature is loss of knowledge of famous people.

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