MODALITY-SPECIFIC SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE LOSS FOR UNIQUE ITEMS

We report the case of a man who, following a major myocardial infarcti on, suffered anoxia followed by significant event memory impairment. I nvestigations indicated that his semantic memory for word concepts and object meanings was well preserved. However, he had great difficulty in identifying in the visual (but not verbal) modality historically kn own people, such as Queen Elizabeth I and Napoleon, and well known wor ld and London landmarks, such as the Parthenon and Buckingham Palace. This selective impairment could not be accounted for in terms of proso pagnosia or high level visual perceptual deficits and we interpret it as a modality specific semantic memory loss for unique objects.