Visual Agnosia Essay

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Prosopagnosia

Agnosia is a clinical term that describes a condition where the individual fails to recognize certain types of objects in specific sensory domains (Farah, 2004). This failure of recognition cannot be due to some type of a sensory impairment or to an expressive language impairment. Visual agnosia is a specific agnosia for visually -- based stimuli. People who have the different types of visual agnosias can actually see the object, but they are not able to identify the object (Farah, 2004). A visual agnosia can be very specific and limited to an aspect of vision such as color, movement, or specific types of objects. The fact that a visual agnosia can be very specific supports the theory that various areas in the visual cortex are specialized for particular types of functions (Farah, 2004). One of the most interesting visual agnosias is called prosopagnosia, which is a difficulty in recognizing human faces (McNeil & Warrington, 2013).

A person with prosopagnosia will often be able to recognize a human face as being a human face, but they are unable to recognize who the face belongs to even if it belongs to someone very familiar to them like a relative, spouse, or best friend (Farah, 2004).

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There are two major types of prosopagnosia: acquired prosopagnosia and congenital prosopagnosia (also called developmental or hereditary prosopagnosia; Bate, 2011; Farah, 2004).

Acquired prosopagnosia develops as the result of the injury to the brain such as a traumatic brain injury or a stroke (McNeil & Warrington, 2013). Prior to the brain injury individuals with this type of prosopagnosia have no significant history of difficulties with facial recognition. Most often individuals diagnosed with acquired prosopagnosia have damage to the brain area known as the fusiform gyrus (Hatfield, 2013). This area is in the ventral visual stream between the boundaries of the temporal lobes and the occipital lobes of the brain (McNeil & Warrington, 2013). The connection between damage to the fusiform gyrus and prosopagnosia is so well-known that the fusiform gyrus has been labeled the "fusiform face area" by some brain researchers (Hatfield, 2013). Some researchers break down acquired prosopagnosia into two subtypes: apperceptive prosopagnosia and associative prosopagnosia (Farah, 2004).

Apperceptive prosopagnosia is believed to be a result of a disruption in the early brain process of facial recognition and involves the right occipital/temporal region of the brain. Individuals cannot distinguish between same and different pictures.....

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