Selective Deficit for People’s Names Following Left Temporal Damage: An Impairment of Domain-Specific Conceptual Knowledge

Abstract

As a consequence of a head trauma, APA presented with selective anomia for the names of familiar people, in the absence of comparable disorders for common names and other proper names. Face recognition was normal; and naming performance was unaffected by stimulus and response types. Selective proper name anomia was not due to effects of frequency of usage or of age of acquisition, or to selective memory/learning deficits for the names of people. Even though APA was able to provide at least some information on many celebrities whom she failed to name, she was clearly impaired in all tasks that required full conceptual information on the same people (but she performed flawlessly in similar tasks that involved common names). This pattern of performance indicates that in our subject the inability to name familiar persons results from damage to conceptual information. It is argued that detailed analyses of conceptual knowledge are necessary before it is concluded that a subject with proper name anomia suffers from a purely output disorder, as opposed to a conceptual disorder. The behaviour observed in APA is consistent with the domain-specific hypothesis of conceptual organisation (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998), and in this framework can be explained by assuming selective damage to knowledge of conspecifics. The anatomo-clinical correlates of our subject's disorder are discussed with reference to recent hypotheses on the neural structures representing knowledge of familiar people.

The fur of the crocodile and the mooing sheep: A study of a patient with a category-specific impairment for biological things

“…Yet none of these ideas accounts for the fact that ER recognised not only body parts but also human items such as an old lady, a black boy, and a baby. His pattern of results thus seems more consistent with Shelton et al's (1998) suggestion that there is a separate network for conspecifics (see also Kay & Hanley, 1999;Miceli et al, 2000).…”

“…ER's pattern of performance is consistent with the growing belief (Barbarotto et al, 2001;Caramazza, 1998;Kay & Hanley, 1999;Miceli et al, 2000;Shelton et al, 1998) that the categories of animals, plant life, conspecifics, and artefacts are dissociable. According to this taxonomic conception, there are separate subsystems of semantic representation for different categories, but there is no such separation for features: All conceptual information, both sensorial and nonsensorial, related to a particular category, is represented in the same neural network.…”

“…Evolutionary pressures (e.g., need for nurture, protection, and food, and avoidance of predators) resulted in dedicated neural mechanisms for processing specific kinds of objects like animals and plant life (and also conspecifics, according to Kay & Hanley, 1999;Miceli et al, 2000;Shelton, Fouch, & Caramazza, 1998). Nonliving things need not be a specific domain knowledge emerging from evolutionary pressures (Barbarotto, Capitani, & Laiacona, 2001;) for category-specific deficits to occur as a result of brain damage.…”

We are what we eat: How food is represented in our mind/brain

“…Indeed, patients with a disproportionate or selectively impaired processing of animals (Blundo, Ricci, & Miller, 2006;Caramazza & Shelton, 1998), fruit/vegetables (Hart, Berndt, & Caramazza, 1985;Laiacona, Barbarotto, & Capitani, 2005;Samson & Pillon, 2003), conspecifics (Ellis, Young, & Critchley, 1989;Miceli et al, 2000), social groups (Rumiati et al, 2014), or non-living things (Laiacona & Capitani, 2001;Sacchett & Humphreys, 1992) have been described. Moreover, Laiacona, Capitani, and Caramazza (2003) published the case of an HSE patient, E.A., who exhibited a poor recognition of living things and preserved recognition of sensoryquality categories (i.e., liquids, substances, and materials).…”

Differential Activity for Animals and Manipulable Objects in the Anterior Temporal Lobes

“…The semantic categories that are observed to be disproportionately impaired include conspecifics (Ellis, Young, & Critchley, 1989;Miceli, Capasso, Daniele, Esposito, Magarelli & Tomaiuolo, 2000), animals (Caramazza & Shelton 1998;Blundo, Ricci, & Miller, L. 2006), fruit and vegetables (Hart, Berndt & Caramazza, 1985;Samson & Pillon, 2003) and nonliving objects (Caramazza & Hillis, 1991;Sacchett & Humphreys, 1992;Laiacona & Capitani, 2001). Lesion-deficit correlation studies of brain damaged patients (Damasio, Grabowski, Tranel, Hichwa, & Damasio, 1996;Tranel, Damasio, & Damasio, 1997;Damasio, Tranel., Grabowski, Adolphs, & Damasio, 2004) and reviews of the available neuropsychological data (Gainotti 2000;Capitani, Laiacona, Mahon, & Caramazza, 2003) have shown that deficits for different categories of objects tend to be associated with specific loci of brain lesion, despite the fact that deficits for knowledge of a category of objects can sometimes derive from lesions to different brain areas.…”