ABSTRACT
In January 1985 Michelangelo was presented with the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) set of line drawings and was able to correctly name 17/54 (31%), 11/31 (35%), and 131/175 (75%) of animals, vegetables, and objects, respectively. Although Michelangelo’s poor naming was not restricted to animals and vegetables, his performance was worse for these categories than for man-made objects. Michelangelo is a particularly interesting case because he was an active member of the WWF (World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) and an underwater diver, and, according to his wife and colleagues, he was able to identify huge numbers of mammals, fish, and birds premorbidly. The Snodgrass and Vanderwart’s (1980) set was administered again in December 1989 and the results showed a similar pattern over time (Figure 2.1). The Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) line
drawings do not convey information about colour or texture, and these properties might well be important for recognition (Price & Humphreys, 1989). Colour could be particularly important for the identification of living things (Sheridan & Humphreys, 1993; Warrington & McCarthy, 1987). Consequently, two other picture-naming tasks were administered in 1985 to assess the influence of surface properties of objects, such as colour and texture. One set of coloured pictures was taken from Ladybird Books. Control subjects performed equally well across categories (mean correct = 61/61 objects, 19.7/ 20 animals and 38.7/39 vegetables) but Michelangelo was much poorer at naming animals (9/20) than objects (47/61) (Fisher P<.001). With the Snodgrass and Vanderwart set he showed an advantage for objects over vegetables but this was not confirmed with the second set of stimuli (29/39 correct for vegetables) (Fisher P = .47) and he was significantly worse with animals compared to vegetables (P = .02). In a further set of 48 photographs of animals, Michelangelo correctly named only 16/48 (33%). Control subjects scored an average 42.7/48 (89%) correct and Michelangelo’s performance was markedly below the worst control in naming animals (control range 41-44), even when stimuli were presented as photographs. In summary, the cardinal feature of Michelangelo’s naming impairment was a severe and persistent inability to name exemplars from the category of living things, a pattern that appeared similar to the post-encephalitis patients originally reported by Warrington and Shallice (1984).
