Short Description or Definition
Visual agnosia is a neurological deficit that results in impairments in the perception and recognition of complex visual stimuli such as common objects or faces, while low-level visual processes and the memory systems remain intact. The primary cause of these deficits is damage in the lateral part of the occipital lobes and/or in the ventral portion of the temporal lobes.
Categorization
Visual agnosias can be divided into two main types: apperceptive visual agnosias and associative visual agnosias. This distinction was first put forth by Lissauer (1980), who suggested a pathological difference between (1) the inability to correctly perceive an object as a coherent whole because of perceptual deficits and (2) the inability to ascribe meaning to an object despite an accurate perception of that object because of deficits in accessing the stored object representations. He dubbed the former as “apperceptive” and the latter as “associative.”
Neuropsychology...
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References and Readings
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Righi, G., Tarr, M.J. (2018). Visual Agnosia. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1410
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1410
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