A Case Study of Visual Agnosia without Perceptual Processing or Structural Descriptions Impairment.

We report a new case of visual associative agnosia. Our patient (DJ) was impaired in several tasks assessing visual processing of real objects, colour pictures, and line drawings. The deficit was present both with naming and gesturing responses. Object processing in other modalities (verbal, auditory nonverbal, and tactile) was intact. Semantic processing was impaired in the visual but not in the verbal modality. Picture-word matching was better than single picture identification. DJ's visual perceptual processing, was intact in several tasks such as visual attributes discrimination, shape discrimination, illusory contours perception, segmentation, embedded figures processing and matching objects under different viewpoints. Most importantly, we show that there was no impairment of stored structural descriptions and that the patient was able to build new visual representations. These results are considered in the context of Farah's (1990, 1991) proposals about visual associative agnosia.