Abstract

Abstract Although they cannot recognise people from their faces, prosopagnosic patients are frequently able to identify people from their voices or clothing. They can also retrieve information about these people in response to their name (e.g. De Haan, Young, & Newcombe, 1987). In contrast, we present details of a patient, BD, who, following herpes simplex encephalitis, has difficulty in identifying people from their face, their name, and their voice. This seems to be a form of semantic memory impairment, and for BD it appears in the context of a more general impairment of knowledge of living things. In learning tasks similar to those used by De Haan et al. (1987) and Kapur, Heath, Meudell, and Kennedy (1986), however, BD shows evidence of preserved access to information concerning people that he does not recognise from their face or name. The pattern of preserved access that is revealed is more extensive than that shown by De Haan et al.'s prosopagnosic patient PH. BD shows covert knowledge of the political background of politicians whose faces he does not recognise overtly and covert knowledge of the football teams of soccer players whose names he does not find familiar. It is suggested that unlike PH, whose difficulties seem to occur at the level of face recognition units, BD's problems also reflect difficulty in gaining overt access to, and output from, mental representations of precise person semantic information.

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