The temporal pole is a paralimbic region involved in high level semantic representation and socio-emotional processing.

The uncinate fasciculus provides a direct bidirectional path to the orbitofrontal cortex, allowing mnemonic representations stored in the temporal pole to bias decision making in the frontal lobe.

[1] In addition, concepts of individual people, abstracted away from the perceptual representations, are stored in a “face patch” in the temporal pole.

[2] This relates to early work showing that damage to the temporal pole can cause an amnestic prosopagnosia in which recognition of familiar faces is lost.

[3] Cytoarchitectonic and chemoarchitectonic studies find that it contains at least seven subareas, one of which, "TG", is unique to humans.