Abstract
Recently, Prosopagnosia, inability to recognize visually familiar faces, has been discussed on its heterogenuity. De Renzi (1991) and Benton (1993) classifyed prosopagnosia into apperceptive and associative forms. Covert recognition for familiar faces which had not been identified overtly was revealed in some cases of associative prosopagnosia since the first report by Bruyer et al (1983).
We reported a case with prosopagnosia and cerebral achromatopsia following bilateral infarction of the posterior cerebral artery territories. Signs of covert face recognition were evidenced in the behavioral methology such as familiar-unfamiliar discrimination task, a test of occupationguess, face-name learning task and multiple forced-choice method. The patient was unable to identify famous faces overtly, but he seemed to have access covertly to semantic code of those faces, e. g. name and / or occupation.
Covert recognition is a interesting phenomenon which may elucidate a mechanism of prosopagnosia.
