Abstract
Tests of word and face processing were given to patients with complex partial epilepsy focussed on the left or right temporal lobe, and to non-epileptic control subjects. The left TLE group showed the greatest impairment on object naming and on reading tests, but the right TLE group also showed a lesser impairment relative to the normal control subjects on both tests. The right TLE group was selectively impaired on distinguishing famous from non-famous faces while the left TLE group was impaired at naming famous faces they had successfully recognized as familiar. There was no significant difference between the three groups on recognition memory for words. The implications of the results for theories of the role of the temporal lobes in word and face processing, and the possible neural mechanisms responsible for the deficits in TLE patients, are discussed.
Highlights
Surgical removal of temporal lobe structures has long been known to have consequences for cognitive performance which differ according to whether the left or right temporal lobe has been excised
Post-hoc Newman-Keuis tests (p < 0'05) showed that the control group performed significantly better than both the left and the right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) groups, but that the left TLE group was significantly worse than the right TLE group on object naming
The right TLE group performed significantly worse than the left TLE group and the controls on the familiarity decision component of the faces line-up
Summary
Surgical removal of temporal lobe structures has long been known to have consequences for cognitive performance which differ according to whether the left or right temporal lobe has been excised. Milner, 1958; Petrides and Milner, 1982) Memory impairments of this sort are commonly assumed to be a consequence of damage to the hippocampal complexes of the left or right hemispheres, but deficits following anterior temporal lobectomy are not restricted to tasks involving long-term recognition or recall memory. Left anterior temporal lobectomy has been shown to affect the perception of dichotically presented nonsense syllables (Berlin et al, 1972), while right anterior temporal lobectomy affects the ability to report the number of dots in briefly presented dot patterns (Kimura, 1963). Such results suggest cortical as well as subcortical impairments in temporal lobe epilepsy. Several other studies have reported significant differences between left and right temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) patients who have not undergone temporal lobectomy. Fedio and Mirsky (1969) compared the performance
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