Temporal pole

The front most or the rostral tip or apex of the temporal lobe is known as the temporal pole.

The temporal pole region is involved in various high-level cognitive functions, including processing visual information for complex objects, recognizing and naming faces, autobiographic memory (storing memories related to one’s own life), labelling objects with names, semantic processing (processing meanings in different sensory modalities), and dealing with social and emotional cues, empathy, and insight.

Damage or lesions in the temporal pole has been associated with neurological impairments, such as prosopagnosia (difficulty recognizing faces), loss of remote autobiographical memory, difficulty recalling names (name anomia), problems recognizing emotions, and several neuropsychiatric disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, social anxiety disorder, depression, and attention-deficit-hyperactive disorder (ADHD).