A VERBAL-SEMANTIC CATEGORY-SPECIFIC RECOGNITION IMPAIRMENT

The paper reports a patient with a category-specific recognition defic it following herpes simplex encephalitis infection. The patient, SB, h as greater difficulty identifying animals and foodstuffs than inanimat e objects. We show that for the impaired categories, SB has intact str uctural knowledge when accessed visually. However, she was poor at ret rieving this knowledge from other input modalities, and she had impair ed verbal-semantic knowledge concerning the affected categories. She a lso showed item-specific consistency across time and modalities. SB's deficit is attributed to a loss of verbal-semantic knowledge. A contra st is drawn between SB and other patients in the literature, and it is suggested that category-specific problems can be linked to a number o f different functional impairments. Problems emerge according to the s imilarity between items at a particular processing level, and to the u se of cross-modality associations in differentiating within object cla sses.