Rapid and specific processing of person-related information in human anterior temporal lobe

Communications Biology

Veronica Pelliccia¹  Ivana Sartori¹  Artem Platonov²  Giorgio LoRusso³  Guy A. Orban³  Pietro Avanzini⁴ 

[1]Claudio Munari Center for Epilepsy Surgery,Niguarda Hospital, Ospedale Ca’

[2]Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

[3]Granda Niguarda, Milan, Italy

[4]Institute of Neuroscience, CNR, Parma, Italy

DOI  :  10.1038/s42003-018-0250-0

学科分类：生物科学（综合）

来源: Nature Publishing Group

【 摘 要 】

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL), located at the tip of the human temporal lobes, has been heavily implicated in semantic processing by neuropsychological and functional imaging studies. These techniques have revealed a hemispheric specialization of ATL, but little about the time scale on which it operates. Here we show that ATL is specifically activated in intracerebral recordings when subjects discriminate the gender of an actor presented in a static frame followed by a video. ATL recording sites respond briefly (100 ms duration) to the visual static presentation of an actor in a task-, but not in a stimulus-duration-dependent way. Their response latencies correlate with subjects’ reaction times, as do their activity levels, but oppositely in the two hemispheres operating in a push-pull fashion. Comparison of ATL time courses with those of more posterior, less specific regions emphasizes the role of inhibitory operations sculpting the fast ATL responses underlying semantic processing.

【 授权许可】

CC BY