ABSTRACT
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".
Subject(s)
Agnosia/psychology , Alzheimer Disease/psychology , Attention/physiology , Visual Perception/physiology , Agnosia/diagnosis , Agnosia/physiopathology , Alzheimer Disease/diagnosis , Alzheimer Disease/physiopathology , Brain/physiopathology , Discrimination Learning/physiology , Female , Humans , Middle Aged , Neuropsychological Tests , Orientation/physiology , Paired-Associate Learning/physiology , Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology , Perceptual Distortion/physiology , Problem Solving/physiology , Psychomotor Performance/physiology , Size Perception/physiologyABSTRACT
To understand some aspects of conceptual development it is necessary to take cognitive architecture into account. For this purpose, the study of normal development is often not sufficient. Fortunately, one can also study neurodevelopmental disorders. For example, autistic children have severe difficulties developing certain kinds of concepts but not others. We find that whereas autistic children perform very poorly on tests of the concept, believes, they are at or near ceiling on comparable tasks that test understanding of pictorial representation. A similar pattern was found in a second study which looked at understanding of a false map or diagram: normal 4-year-olds showed a marked advantage in understanding a false belief over a false map, while the autistic subjects performed better on the map. These findings suggest that the concept, believes, develops as a domain-specific notion that is not equatable with "having a picture (map or diagram) in the head." This result supports the existence of a specialized cognitive mechanism, which subserves the development of folk psychological notions, and which is dissociably damaged in autism. We extend these ideas to outline a new model of the development of false belief performance.
