Visual agnosia: a case of reduced attentional "spotlight"?

A case study is presented of a patient with presenile dementia, for whom the dominant clinical feature from onset was a visual agnosia. The characteristics of the patient's visual agnosia were investigated in light of her apparent use of a "feature-by-feature" strategy to identify objects. Results from various tasks showed that the patient was unable to use global shape information or other grossly defined property cues characteristic of a "wide angle" attentional processing stage (Treisman, 1988) in object recognition. The patient appeared instead to rely on 'parts' or identifying features of the objects for object recognition. The patient showed significant improvement when the size of the drawing was reduced in size, thus suggesting that the disorder may be functionally localized to a reduction of the patient's attentional "spotlight".