Visual Memory

ROSÓN, María and VEGA, Jesusa (2009). “Goya, de la República al Franquismo. Reinterpretaciones y manipulaciones (1936-1950)”. In XIV Jornadas Internaciones de Historia del Arte: Arte en tiempos de guerra. Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. pp. 245-259.

Der im späten 18. Jahrhundert vollzogene Übergang von einer höfischen Sammlung zum öffentlichen Kunstmuseum lässt sich am Beispiel der kaiserlichen Gemäldegalerie in Wien exemplarisch studieren. Die Publikation unternimmt es, das vom Basler Kunsthändler Christian von Mechel auf Einladung von Kaiser Joseph II. realisierte, für Europa richtungsweisende Museumskonzept im Detail zu rekonstruieren und auf seine institutions- und mediengeschichtlichen Implikationen hin zu befragen. Da dieses Konzept Bestandteil eines komplexen historischen Prozesses war, werden auch andere wichtige Schauplätze des museumsgeschichtlichen Umbruchs – darunter Düsseldorf, Paris, Florenz und Berlin – im Blick gehalten. Auf dieser Grundlage werden neue Perspektiven auf die Geschichte, Theorie und Ästhetik der Institution Kunstmuseum eröffnet und für die aktuelle Debatte um seine Funktionen und Aufgaben bereitgestellt.
Band 1 widmet sich der Dokumentation und Rekonstruktion der 1783 im Belvedere aufgestellten Gemäldesammlung. Auf Archivalien und Aufsätze, die diese Neuordnungen kunsttheoretisch und ideengeschichtlich verorten, folgt eine Visualisierung der Galerieräume anhand des von Christian von Mechel veröffentlichten Katalogs. Der Band bietet sowohl theoretische wie auch anschauliche Zugänge zu diesem historisch wirkmächtigen Museumskonzept an.

Within the medieval Orthodox Balkan culture, visual memory of death has manifold functions. Representations of violent death were preserved within images in Menologia, such as the one in Treskavac Monastery, and through particular hagiography cycles, like the one of Saint Parasceve in the Monastery of Donja Kamenica. The image which commemorates the death of an anachoret is very important in ascertaining the identity of the saint’s cult, which can be seen in the representation of The Funeral of Saint Gavril of Lesnovo in Lesnovo Monastery.

Dysfunction of executive neuropsychological performance, mediated by the prefrontal cortex, has been the central focus of recent attention deficit/ hyperkinetic disorder (AD-HKD) research. The role of other potential neuropsychological "risk factors", such as recognition memory, remains understudied. Further, the impact of methylphenidate (MPH) on key neuropsychological processes in AD-HKD remains poorly understood. To compare the performance of boys with AD-HKD on a spatial working memory (SWM) task and on two non-working memory tasks [a simultaneous and delayed matching-to-sample task (DMtS) and a pattern-recognition task] with that of healthy boys, and to investigate the impact of acute and chronic MPH on performance of these tasks. Baseline performance of 75 stimulant-naive boys with AD-HKD was compared with that of 70 healthy boys. The AD-HKD boys were then re-tested following the administration of acute and chronic challenges with MPH (0.3 mg/kg and 0.6 mg/kg) under ...

Neuropsychologia (2004), 42(5), 597-612.

Associative visual agnosia is classically defined as normal visual perception stripped of its meaning (Lissauer, 1890): these patients cannot access to their stored visual memories to categorize the objects nonetheless perceived correctly. However, according to an influential theory of visual agnosia (Farah, 1990), visual associative agnosics necessarily present perceptual deficits that are the cause of their impairment at object recognition Here we report a detailed investigation of a patient with bilateral occipito-temporal lesions strongly impaired at object and face recognition. NS presents normal drawing copy, and normal performance at object and face matching tasks as used in classical neuropsychological tests. However, when tested with several computer tasks using carefully controlled visual stimuli and taking both his accuracy rate and response times into account, NS was found to have abnormal performances at high level visual processing of objects and faces. Albeit presenting a different pattern of deficits than previously described in integrative agnosic patients such as HJA and LH, his deficits were characterized by an inability to integrate individual parts into a whole percept, as suggested by his failure at processing structurally impossible 3D objects, an absence of face inversion effect and an advantage at detecting and matching single parts. Taken together, these observations question the idea of separate visual representations for object/face perception and object/face knowledge derived from investigations of visual associative (prosop)agnosia, and they raise some methodological issues in the analysis of single case studies of (prosop)agnosic patients .