V. Gentileschi et al., Crossmodal agnosia for familiar people as a consequence of right infero-polar temporal atrophy, COGN NEUROP, 18(5), 2001, pp. 439-463
A 60-year-old, right-handed woman, with no focal brain lesions, suffered fr
om a progressive impairment in recognising people of personal relevance and
public figures familiar to her in the premorbid period. The patient did no
t suffer from general cognitive deterioration. There was no ecological or c
lear psychometric evidence of visuoperceptual or visuospatial deficits. Her
defective person recognition was not overcome by extra-facial (e.g., obser
ving animated people in their usual surroundings) or extra-visual informati
on (e.g., listening to the voice). Moreover, presenting the correct name in
the presence of an unrecognised familiar person failed to prompt her famil
iarity judgement, or retrieval of the relevant biographical knowledge. The
patient also had some recognition difficulties with famous buildings and so
ngs as well as with some common objects.
It is argued that the patient's difficulty in identifying familiar people w
as the consequence of progressive loss of stored exemplars of familiar pers
ons and perhaps also of some other "unique items" (famous songs and monumen
ts) in an independent subsystem of semantics that we term "exemplar semanti
cs." We discuss the associative (semantic) nature and specificity of the de
ficit in person knowledge, the possible top-down negative influences of the
loss of exemplars in the person recognition system, and the link between t
he disorders and the right/left temporal lobe.