ABSTRACT
Visual agnosia is a disorder that affects the recognition of visually presented objects as a result of impairments to the visual-perceptual system. Most of our understanding of visual agnosia has come from the study of adults who have acquired visual agnosia following brain damage after many years of normal function. Common symptoms include confusion of objects with similar shape (e.g., an “anchor” might be called an “umbrella”; Ratcliff & Newcombe, 1982); greater diffi culty in perceiving line drawings than images that contain additional visual information, such as colour; problems in recognizing objects from unconventional views; diffi culty in segmenting fi gure from ground; and a piecemeal approach to object identifi cation rather than attention to the global form. In no case has any recovery of function been reported.
