ABSTRACT
We have argued that Michelangelo has a deficit to stored knowledge about living things and, in the next section, we assess whether this impairment involved all aspects of these items. When asked open-ended questions such as “What is the visual appearance of an ostrich?”, Michelangelo answered “It has four legs . . . big ears . . . a thick tail”. This example typifies Michelangelo’s responses with questions about the visual appearance of animals. He provided features that were indeed characteristic of animals, but he could not report the specific features of a given animal. However, when we evaluated Michelangelo’s knowledge about the non-visual properties of animals, his performance was better. For example, he was able to sort pictures of ferocious and non-ferocious animals, to match an animal’s sound to its name and to match a verbally presented environment to the name of a given animal (e.g. to match desert with camel). Thus it is clear that Michelangelo had not lost all his knowledge of living things. In the next series of tests we assessed his visual/perceptual knowledge in more detail.
