Dupont Sophie
Epileptology Unit, Neurology Department Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, 47, boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75013 Paris, France.
Epileptic Disord. 2002 Sep;4 Suppl 1:S17-22.
Although the role of the temporal lobe especially its mesial part is becoming clearer, that of the temporal pole remains more mysterious. Temporal pole function can be investigated in various ways: by comparing anatomical and clinical data; through experiments in animals; and by using functional imaging techniques. Anatomo-clinical studies have suggested that the temporal pole is important in autobiographical memory; and studies in monkeys (conditioning and lesional experiments) have revealed a role for the temporal pole in a variety of functions, including taste and olfaction, face recognition, visual discrimination of two-dimensional pictures, and the mnemonic functions of matching and learning. Functional imaging techniques, whether based on positron emission tomography (PET) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), make it possible to observe the functioning of the temporal pole in vivo in both healthy control subjects and patients. Initially, this type of approach was simply used to confirm observations made in animals. More recently it has shed light on other functions, especially with respect to processes associated with linguistic integration, which underlie the ability to make lexical and semantic links between different words and make it possible to understand a story in a general way without prior specific knowledge. Studies of epileptic, demented and schizophrenic patients have revealed that abnormal patterns of temporal pole function are typical in all these conditions.
尽管颞叶尤其是其内侧部分的作用正变得愈发清晰，但颞极的作用仍更为神秘。颞极功能可通过多种方式进行研究：通过比较解剖学和临床数据；通过动物实验；以及使用功能成像技术。解剖学临床研究表明，颞极在自传体记忆中很重要；对猴子的研究（条件反射和损伤实验）揭示了颞极在多种功能中的作用，包括味觉和嗅觉、面部识别、二维图片的视觉辨别以及匹配和学习的记忆功能。功能成像技术，无论是基于正电子发射断层扫描（PET）还是磁共振成像（MRI），都能够在健康对照受试者和患者体内观察颞极的功能。最初，这类方法仅仅用于证实动物实验的观察结果。最近，它揭示了其他功能，特别是与语言整合相关的过程，这些过程是在不同单词之间建立词汇和语义联系并能够在没有先验特定知识的情况下以一般方式理解故事的能力的基础。对癫痫患者、痴呆患者和精神分裂症患者的研究表明，颞极功能的异常模式在所有这些病症中都很典型。
