Agnosia S

Perceptual Disorders
Agnosias
Disorders of Object Recognition
AGNOSIA : a general term for a loss of ability to recognize
objects, people, sounds, shapes, or smells.
Agnosias result from damage to cortical areas of the visual

system (retina and optic nerve are not impaired, nor is visual
acuity, color, motion or depth perception impaired).
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DSM does not officially categorize agnosia however, they
are commonly divided into two categories:
Apperceive Agnosia and Associative Agnosia.
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Apperceptive Agnosias (Difficulty with
perceptual processes)
Have trouble recognizing, copying, or
discriminating between different visual stimuli. Ex.
may not be able to distinguish a poker chip from a
scrabble tile despite there clear difference in
shape and surface features.
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Simultanagnosia refers to an inability to
recognize two or more things at the same time.
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Simultanagnosia: lose the ability to see "global" objects, and
can only very narrowly focus their visual attention. For
example, in this image: they can see "T"s but not the "H".
- may have difficulty reading and counting because these
activities involve viewing more than one thing at a time.
- may seem to be "blind" since they bump into objects that are
close together. Motion may further impair their ability to
perceive objects.
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When patients are able to
identify objects, they do so
based on inferences using
color, size, texture and
memory to piece it together.
Video (begin @ .33)
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Associative agnosias - perceptual
processes are intact but patient is unable to
recognize visually presented objects
-may be able to replicate a drawing of the
object but still fail to recognize it.
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Object Recognition
Apperceptive Associative
Agnosia Agnosia
Integrating or
Combing
features
Shape
Processing
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Auditory Agnosia: - inability to recognize or differentiate between
sounds.
• Verbal auditory agnosia (aka: pure word deafness) refers to deficits

specific to speech processing,
• Environmental sound agnosia refers to difficulties confined to non-
speech environmental sounds.
• Amusia refers to deficits confined to music.
• These deficits can be apperceptive, affecting basic perceptual
processes, or associative, affecting the relation of a perceived
auditory object to its meaning.
Prosopagnosia: Face blindness
• Prosopagnosia is a selective and often severe deficit in the ability to
recognize others’ faces. People suffering from the disorder are often
unable to recognize their friends and family members by face alone,
instead relying on vocal cues for proper identification. They cannot name
images of celebrities, even if they can describe who the celebrity is.
• They often describe faces as nearly indistinguishable; one patient
characterized faces as “strangely flat, white with emphatic dark eyes, as if
made from a flat surface, like white, oval plates, all alike.” However, their
general visual ability and recognition of non-face objects often remains
intact.
Source
Oliver Sacks on Agnosia and Face blindness
Video described a woman
who could not recognize
her family’s faces or her
own. She could recognize
people through voices, hair
color, eye color…
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Face Recognition
Is it different than Object recognition? Yes.
More Holistic - altering the appearance of one

facial region can strikingly affect the percept of
other regions and of the whole face (Part-whole
illusion).
Perceptual Disorders 16
Part-whole illusion.
Part-whole illusion. The only difference between the two images
is the mouth. Altering the mouth creates illusions of alteration in
regions of the rest of the face (e.g., makes the nose appear
shorter on left and longer on right, makes the eyes appear more
interested on left and less interested on right). In the inverted
version, the difference in the mouth shape can be easily seen
but the illusory changes in the rest of the face are not apparent.
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Composite Face Illusion
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Composite Face Illusion Explanation
Composite stimuli are whole faces comprised of two halves taken from
different individuals. When asked to decide if two identical top halves
are the ‘same’, subjects are more accurate (or faster to respond) in
misaligned trials, than in aligned trials. This performance advantage for
misaligned trials is referred to as the composite face effect (CFE). The
proposed explanation is that aligned features are automatically fused
together and form a global identity that interferes with the recognition
of smaller components (the composite face illusion, CFI). However,
when composite faces are misaligned, it appears to be much easier to
ignore the identity of the whole face and process individual features.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2009.04.025
Fusiform Face Area of temporal Lobe.
source
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When doctors stimulated two spots in his fusiform gyrus,
Blackwell, who does not ordinarily suffer from face blindness,
could still remember his doctor's name, and he could read words
and identify objects in his hospital room.
But a video taken of the test shows Blackwell telling Parvizi, "Your
nose got saggy, went to the left. You almost looked like
somebody I'd seen before, somebody different."
A few minutes later, Parvizi stimulated the same bundles of
nerves and asked Blackwell to look at a different doctor in the
room. "The bottom of her face sort of metamorphosed up,"
Blackwell said. "It kind of stretched up to give her a different
look. Um, it wasn't pretty."
Bruce and Young (1986) model of face recognition.
(1) Face detection followed by

(2) processing of the face’s
structure which is then
matched to a memory
representation (face memory).
(3) The perceptual representation
of the face can also be used for
recognition of facial expression
and gender discrimination.
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Evidence of separate processes
• Case Study of Edward: impaired face recognition but
normal face detection.
• Some Prosopagnosia patients cannot recognize faces
but can recognize emotions.
• Alexithymia - Emotion blindness
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Individual differences in Face Recognition
Ability
Developmental vs. Acquired Prosopagnosia
Criminal Justice Application
Want to test your own Face Recognition Ability
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Perceptual Disorders

Agnosias result from damage to cortical areas of the visual

Video (begin @ .33)

• Verbal auditory agnosia (aka: pure word deafness) refers to deficits

More Holistic - altering the appearance of one

(1) Face detection followed by

Want to test your own Face Recognition Ability

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