A selective deficit for living things after temporal lobectomy for relief of epileptic seizures.

Unilateral left and right temporal lobectomy patients and normal control subjects were tested on confrontation naming, speeded naming, category generation, and category and associate matching tasks. Both groups of patients were disproportionately impaired for living relative to nonliving things in confrontation naming, speeded naming, and category generation. We argue that damage to the temporal lobe impairs lexical retrieval most strongly for living things and that the anterior temporal cortices are convergence zones particularly necessary for retrieving the names of living things.