Prosopagnosia: A face-specific disorder

A follow-up study of a patient, WJ, with a very severe prosopagnosia is reported. After a stroke he became a farmer and acquired a flock of sheep. He learnt to recognize and name many of his sheep, and his performance on tests of recognition memory and paired-associate learning for sheep was significantly better than on comparable tests using human face stimuli. It is concluded that in some instances prosopagnosia can be a face-specific disorder.     

Word recognition in a phonemic dyslexic patient

The systems underlying word recognition were investigated in a single case study of a patient (K.F.) with an acquired dyslexia. His reading performance was related to parts of speech, word frequency and word concreteness, and his reading errors were analysed. There was a very striking difference between his ability to read concrete and abstract words. Furthermore visual errors, which could not be attributed to a deficit at a peripheral level, predominated; phonemic errors did not occur. It is argued that these findings support a dual encoding model of word recognition, the present case illustrating the impairment of the phonemic route, a direct graphemic-semantic route being relatively spared. These findings and interpretation are for the most part consistent with Marshall and Newcombe's (1973) studies of acquired dyslexia. The present findings are discussed in terms of more general theories of word recognition.     

A stable one-dimensional quasicrystal related to decagonal Al-Co-Ni

A stable one-dimensional quasicrystal has been found for Al-Co-Ni which is related closely to the decagonal phase in this system. It exists as a high-temperature state above 900 C in a range of compositions between approximately 71 and 71.5at.% Al between 18at.% and 22at.% Co. The modulation length along the periodic direction in its pseudo tenfold diffraction patterns is approximately 61A. We show that the 20A edge length defective rhomb tiling superimposed on to a corresponding high-resolution image, defined by centres of atomic clusters, can be considered as a subset of a phason-strained, 2.5A edge length Penrose tiling that has the observed period. An ideal 20A edge length tiling based on special configurations of this Penrose tiling can be chosen as a prototype for the observed experimental tiling.     

The effect of orienting tasks on recognition memory

The effect of orienting tasks on recognition memory for words and faces was investigated. It was found that relevant orienting tasks improved recognition memory for both classes of stimuli compared with a nonrelevant orienting task and the control condition of testing recognition memory without an orienting task. Attention is drawn to the possibility of qualitative differences between recall and recognition for the effect of orienting tasks. The findings are related to recognition theories. It is suggested that the findings lend support to those theories which hold that retrieval processes play a major role in recognition memory.     

Immediate memory for faces: Long- or short-term memory?

Immediate recognition memory span and short-term forgetting for non-verbal stimuli (“unfamiliar faces”) were investigated in normal subjects and amnesic patients. Surnames were used as a verbal control. It was found that normal subjects had a reliable immediate recognition span of one for faces and that there was no decrement in performance in the retention of three faces over a 30-s interval. Amnesic subjects were impaired on both the immediate memory span task and on the short-term forgetting task. This pattern of results contrasts with those obtained using surnames on which the results were comparable to other verbal S.T.M. tasks. It is suggested that performance on these tasks of recognition memory for faces is determined by L.T.M. processes. The implications for the interpretation of S.T.M. are discussed.     

The effect of an after-coming random pattern on the perception of brief visual stimuli

The perception of briefly exposed visual forms is shown to be masked by an after- coming random pattern stimulus of approximately equal intensity. This effect occurs only under certain well defined conditions; it is limited by the minimum stimulus exposure time in excess of threshold which overcomes masking (critical stimulus duration) as well as by the minimum interval between presentation of the two stimuli which permits evasion of the masking action (critical interval). Over the range of stimulus duration in which masking occurs, critical interval varied with stimulus duration in such a way that the interval multiplied by the stimulus duration equals a constant. Critical stimulus duration and critical interval at threshold are shown to vary little under a variety of conditions. The effect of the random pattern stimulus is limited to the part of the visual field to which it is presented.     

Word form access dyslexia: understanding the basis of visual reading errors

We report the case of a patient V.E.M. who exhibits the infrequently described syndrome of visual dyslexia. V.E.M. read many single words accurately and rapidly; however, when words were read inaccurately, the majority of responses were alternate real words bearing a strong visual relationship to the target items. A series of observational and experimental investigations of her reading skills revealed that response accuracy was strongly affected by word frequency and mildly affected by concreteness but not influenced by word length, orthographic neighbourhood size, or semantic priming. It is argued that V.E.M.'s visual dyslexia results from a deficit of the visual word form system. More specifically, we propose that this deficit has an “access” quality, with visual word form representations remaining relatively intact despite an impairment in the processes by which these representations are activated. Taking the results of this study together with previous reports of dyslexic patients who make a high proportion of visual paralexic errors, we also suggest that visual dyslexia represents a multicomponent dyslexic syndrome for which phonological impairment and not semantic impairment may be a necessary condition.     

Past,present, and prospects: Reflections 40 years on from the selective impairment of semantic memory (Warrington, 1975)

We summarize the main findings and conclusions of Warrington's (1975) paper, The Selective Impairment of Semantic memory, a neuropsychological paper that described three cases with degenerative neurological conditions [Warrington, E. K. (1975). The selective impairment of semantic memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27, 635–657]. We consider the developments that have followed from its publication and give a selective overview of the field in 2014. The initial impact of the paper was on neuropsychological investigations of semantic loss followed some 14 years later by the identification of Semantic Dementia (the condition shown by the original cases) as a distinctive form of degenerative disease with unique clinical and pathological characteristics. We discuss the distinction between disorders of semantic storage and refractory semantic access, the evidence for category- and modality-specific impairments of semantics, and the light that has been shed on the structure and organization of semantic memory. Finally we consider the relationship between semantic memory and the skills of reading and writing, phonological processing, and autobiographical memory.     

Prosopagnosia: A reclassification

We report a quantitative investigation of three patients who presented with a profound prosopagnosia. They were tested on a series of tests of face perception, face recognition, and paired associate learning using faces. A patient with marked perceptual difficulties but no difficulty whatever in recognizing faces was tested as a control. The control patient's performance was as bad or worse on the tests of perception of faces, and it is concluded that impaired performance on tests of face perception does not contribute to difficulties in recognizing familiar faces. The major difference between the three prosopagnosic patients was the evidence of covert recognition in two of these cases but not in the third. We use this evidence to argue that the perceptual/mnestic distinction is an inappropriate classification and would suggest instead that the two types may be described in terms either of a disconnection of the face recognition units or of damage to the units themselves.