A single case study of a brain damaged patient with a category-specific visual agnosia for living things is described. The patient's deficit is manifested as a profound inability to identify, label or classify biological visual objects at the basic level. Most similar cases in the literature have been described as due to damage to a pre-categorical structural description system. However, all these cases also displayed content-specific impairments in activating knowledge from words. ELM's ability to activate basic-level knowledge from pictures and words is investigated using accuracy-based and chronometric measures. The pattern of ELM's category-specific visual agnosia is concomitant with his failure to show priming and typicality effects for words. This suggests that ELM's deficit resides within the semantic memory system. Tests of the integrity of structural descriptions reveal that this patient retains implicit access to pre-categorical structural knowledge.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.60486 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Decter, Matthew |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001260110, proquestno: AAIMM72044, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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