Emotional and cognitive characteristics were studied in epileptic patients following unilateral left or right temporal lobe resection. The integrity of attentional and perceptual (visual, auditory, and tactile) systems were evaluated using standard and experimental procedures. Physiological events (skin conductance) were monitored and recorded during test performance. The research examined the role of the temporal lobe in establishing specific limbic associations between left and right hemispheres in regulating cognitive functions and emotional experiences in man. Tachistoscopic studies identified a critical perceputal role for right temporal mechanisms especially during the early stages of visual processing. The left and right temporal lobes contribute differentially to specifying the identify of a stimulus, but not to its position or orientation in space. Left temporal mechanisms encode verbal information during initial learning. Modest compensation for memory defects following temporal lobectomy may be achieved with strategy which combines overt and covert imagery with praxic encoding. In affective sectors, left temporal patients tend to neutralize reactions to nuances with emotional coloration; right temporal patients, in contrast, rate these materials similar to normal individuals. Unike normal individuals, however, the left and right temporal lobectomy patients were hyporesponsive to affective material as indexed by skin conductant measures. Moreover, both lobectomy groups failed to take advantge of the emotional characteristics of information to facilitate memory. These data suggest that unilateral temporal lobectomy disrupts the normal linkage of cognitive-affective associations mediated by temporal limbic interaction. There were, however, beneficial effects to surgical treatment in that patients, following temporal lobe surgry, were less deviant from normal subjects in emotional behavior.
