Brain, Vol. 126, No. 4, 792-803,
April 2003
© 2003 Guarantors of Brain
doi: 10.1093/brain/awg092
Slowly progressive defect in recognition of familiar people in a patient with right anterior temporal atrophy
Neuropsychology Unit, Policlinico Gemelli, Catholic University of Rome, Rome, Italy
Correspondence to: Professor Guido Gainotti, Servizio di Neuropsicologia, Policlinico Gemelli, Largo A. Gemelli, 8, 00168 Roma, Italy E-mail: gainotti{at}rm.unicatt.it
We report the case of a patient (C.O.) who showed a selective defect in the recognition of familiar people, with very mild disease progression during a period of 30 months resulting from focal atrophy of the right temporal lobe. On formal neuropsychological testing, C.O. obtained high scores on tests of general intelligence, episodic memory, language, executive functions, selective attention, visual recognition and visual–spatial abilities. On more specific tasks of familiar and unfamiliar face recognition, C.O. scored above the controls’ means on perceptual tests, but obtained highly pathological results on mnesic–associative tests. His disorder of recognition of familiar people was not due to loss of person-specific information, since he obtained highly abnormal naming scores when presented with photographs of famous people but borderline or mildly abnormal scores in a tasks in which he had to name celebrities from verbal definitions. On the other hand, C.O.’s recognition disorder could not be considered to be a form of ‘associative prosopagnosia’ since a similar defect was observed when he was requested to access information about famous persons through their voice rather than their face. Two alternative interpretations are advanced to explain C.O.’s inability to access his relatively spared person-specific knowledge not only through the person’s face but also through the person’s voice. The first hypothesis is that, before accessing the person-specific information, unimodal recognition channels must converge into a multimodal, non-verbal person-recognition system and that the right anterior temporal cortices play a crucial role in this integrative activity. The second hypothesis is that the face-recognition units have privileged access to person-specific semantic knowledge and that other recognition subsystems require coactivation of the face-recognition units in order to access person-specific semantic information.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  L. Garrido, N. Furl, B. Draganski, N. Weiskopf, J. Stevens, G. C.-Y. Tan, J. Driver, R. J. Dolan, and B. Duchaine Voxel-based morphometry reveals reduced grey matter volume in the temporal cortex of developmental prosopagnosics Brain, November 3, 2009; (2009) awp271v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
J. C. Goll, S. J. Crutch, J. H. Y. Loo, J. D. Rohrer, C. Frost, D.-E. Bamiou, and J. D. Warren Non-verbal sound processing in the primary progressive aphasias Brain, October 1, 2009; (2009) awp235v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
D. Chan, V. Anderson, Y. Pijnenburg, J. Whitwell, J. Barnes, R. Scahill, J. M. Stevens, F. Barkhof, P. Scheltens, M. N. Rossor, et al. The clinical profile of right temporal lobe atrophy Brain, May 1, 2009; 132(5): 1287 - 1298. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 K. A. Josephs, J. L. Whitwell, P. Vemuri, M. L. Senjem, B. F. Boeve, D. S. Knopman, G. E. Smith, R. J. Ivnik, R. C. Petersen, and C. R. Jack Jr The anatomic correlate of prosopagnosia in semantic dementia Neurology, November 11, 2008; 71(20): 1628 - 1633. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 N. Kriegeskorte, E. Formisano, B. Sorger, and R. Goebel Individual faces elicit distinct response patterns in human anterior temporal cortex PNAS, December 18, 2007; 104(51): 20600 - 20605. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
I. R. Olson, A. Plotzker, and Y. Ezzyat The Enigmatic temporal pole: a review of findings on social and emotional processing Brain, July 1, 2007; 130(7): 1718 - 1731. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 S. E. Bouvier and S. A. Engel Behavioral Deficits and Cortical Damage Loci in Cerebral Achromatopsia Cereb Cortex, February 1, 2006; 16(2): 183 - 191. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
W. W. Seeley, A. M. Bauer, B. L. Miller, M. L. Gorno-Tempini, J. H. Kramer, M. Weiner, and H. J. Rosen The natural history of temporal variant frontotemporal dementia Neurology, April 26, 2005; 64(8): 1384 - 1390. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
S. Joubert, O. Felician, E. Barbeau, A. Sontheimer, E. Guedj, M. Ceccaldi, and M. Poncet Progressive prosopagnosia: Clinical and neuroimaging results Neurology, November 23, 2004; 63(10): 1962 - 1965. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
J. S. Snowden, J. C. Thompson, and D. Neary Knowledge of famous faces and names in semantic dementia Brain, April 1, 2004; 127(4): 860 - 872. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
|
|
S. Joubert, O. Felician, E. Barbeau, A. Sontheimer, J. J. Barton, M. Ceccaldi, and M. Poncet Impaired configurational processing in a case of progressive prosopagnosia associated with predominant right temporal lobe atrophy Brain, November 1, 2003; 126(11): 2537 - 2550. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|