[A case of integrative visual agnosia].
We report a 78-year-old right-handed man with integrative visual agnosia (Humphreys et al.) that was associated with bilateral medial occipito-temporal infarction. The patient showed superior altitudinal hemianopsia, alexia, prosopagnosia, cerebral achromatopsia, and object agnosia. Elementary perception and information processing supposed to be executed by the stream to the parietal lobe were intact, since he was able to perceive the position and speed of moving object (catching the flying ball). He could not categorize neither real objects nor line drawings by sight. However, copying and matching of them was accurate, suggesting that his agnosia was an associative type (Lissauer). Detailed neuropsychological examinations revealed that his agnosia was due to a disturbance in integrating local form features into a perceptual whole. In addition, this patient showed difficulty in retrieval of objects from memory. However, it is unlikely that this disturbance itself was a cause of this particular form of agnosia.
Hirayama
K
K
Department of Neurology, Fukushima Medical College, Japan.
Iwasaki
S
S
Yamamoto
T
T
Suzuki
K
K
Kodama
N
N
D000368:Aged; D000377:Agnosia / Q000209:etiology / Q000523:psychology*; D002544:Cerebral Infarction / Q000150:complications; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology