Why leopards never change their spots: A reply to Moss, Tyler, and Jennings

Laws, Evans, Hedges, and McCarthy (1995) documented a selective impairment for associative knowledge about living things in the post-encephalitic pati ent SE. By contrast, Moss, Tyler, and Jennings (1997) recently described a selective loss of visual knowledge for living things in the same patient. T he apparent contradiction in these papers highlights novel and critical met hodological issues in the study of category-specific disorders. A main cont ention of this paper is that Moss et al.'s data do not meet sufficient cond itions for demonstrating a category-specific naming deficit for living thin gs. One implication of this is that their experiments may suffer from a con founding variable that encourages an underestimation of SE's visual knowled ge. Finally, it is argued that Moss et al.'s theoretical interpretation of SE's deficit receives no empirical support.