Abstract
Recently, prosopagnosia has been discussed on its heterogeneity. Visual object agnosia is distinguished between apperceptive form and associative form, so is prosopagnosia.
A case with apperceptive prosopagnosia was reported. Although this case did not present prosopagnosia when he met with right occipital hemorrhagic infarction attack at first, he had persistent and severe apperceptive prosopagnosia and central achromatopsia after the second attack of left occipital hematoma.
Neuropsychological features observed in this case were as follows ; 1) Recognition deficits of familiar faces were severe and persistent. 2) There was not any sufficient evidence that the patient had covert recognition for familiar faces which he was unable to identify overtly. 3) The patient had difficulty in distinguishing among intra-class species or individuals of insects, flowers, cars, or famous architectures. However, our patient with associative prosopagnosia recognized visual stimuli other than face so well that it was safe to say that his recognition deficit was almost face-specific. 4) His ability to discriminate and learn unfamiliar face was impaired more severely than that of our patient with associative prosopagnosia. 5) His impairment of perception was more severe than that of our patient with associative prosopagnosia.
The Visual Perception Test for Agnosia edited by the Japanese Society of Aphasiology will help to detect the difference of neuropsychological features between apperceptive and associative forms of prosopagnosia.
