Functional subdivisions in the anterior temporal lobes: a large scale meta-analytic investigation

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL) is involved in a wide range of cognitive processes but its functional specialization remains unclear. In this review, we synthesize evidence from cytoarchitecture, anatomical and functional connectivity, and functional activation to elucidate how subregions in the ATL contribute to various cognitive processes. Two complementary meta-analyses were conducted. We first constructed a comprehensive functional preference profile for all subregions through large-scale neuroimaging meta-analysis, and then employed a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation analysis to examine such functional preferences by input types. We identified two subregions in the dorsal aspect of the ATL (i.e., superior dorsal, inferior dorsal) and two other subregions (lateral, ventromedial) in the ventral aspect of the ATL, all have distinct anatomical and functional preferences. We proposed sensory, language, and socioemotion as the three dimensions that jointly capture the cognitive components cutting across the four ATL subregions: the superior dorsal ATL was associated with auditory sensory, language (phonological production aspects), and emotion; the inferior dorsal ATL with auditory sensory and language (phonological perception and production aspects); the lateral ATL with visual sensory, language (semantic and episodic aspects), and social processing; and the ventromedial ATL with visual sensory, episodic memory, and emotion. The various functions associated with the ATL can be clustered into subregions, which provides sourceful basis for testing hypothesis-driven cognitive framework.