ABSTRACT
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA The modern era of study of the representation of object concepts in the human brain began in 1983 with a report by Warrington and McCarthy of a patient with preserved knowledge for animals, foods, and flowers, relative to inanimate objects (Warrington & McCarthy, 1983). This was followed the next year by a report of four patients with the opposite pattern of preserved and impaired category knowledge (Warrington & Shallice, 1984). Specifically, these patients presented with a relatively selective impairment for knowing about living things and foods. Since publication of these seminal case studies, over 100 patients have been reported with a category-specific deficit for biological categories (living things, especially four-legged animals), relative to inanimate objects (especially tools and other artifacts), and more than 25 cases with the opposite pattern of deficit (Figure 1). Heightened appreciation of the importance of these clinical cases for understanding the organisation of conceptual knowledge, as well as for object recognition, the organisation of the lexicon, and the storage of long-term memories, has also motivated an increasing number of functional brain-imaging studies of object category representation in the normal human brain. The goal of this special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology is to provide a forum for new findings and critical, theoretical analyses of existing data from patient and functional brainimaging studies.
