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Abstract:
Neuroimaging studies and neuropsychological studies have
indicated that recognition of place is performed by a system
(referred to as the Parahippocampal Place Area) separate from the
system or systems performing object and face recognition. In the
course of testing a severely prosopagnosic individual, I had the
opportunity to run tests examining his recognition of faces as well
as other types of recognition. PT is a 43-year-old computer
engineer with no history of head trauma who reports having
difficulties with face recognition his entire life and also reports
that his son has face recognition problems. On three tests of
unfamiliar face recognition and one famous faces test, PT
manifested severe face recognition impairments. PT's naming of line
drawings from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart corpus was flawless and
prompt. However, his object recognition was not normal, because
PT's accuracy on tests requiring old/new discriminations for horses
and for cars was more than two standard deviations below the
control mean. Despite his impairments, his accuracy on a house test
requiring old/new discriminations was above the control mean and
his response times were faster than the control mean. Thus, this
case adds to other evidence indicating that recognition of place
dissociates from other types of object recognition both
computationally and developmentally.
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