ABSTRACT

Three main theoretical accounts have been proposed for category-specific semantic disorders for living and non-living things. The first, and perhaps most influential model, put forward by Warrington and Shallice (1984) in their seminal paper, proposes that the living-non-living distinction could be the by-product of a more basic dichotomy, concerning the differential weighting that visuoperceptual and functional attributes might have in the identification of members of biological and respectively of artefacts categories. This model is often labelled the “sensory/functional” hypothesis.