ABSTRACT
Study of human brain function after brain lesions can reveal much about the function of the intact brain. HJA suffered a stroke in 1981 which led to a large lesion in the ventral visual pathways. After the lesion, he became visually agnosic for objects and for scenes, prosopagnosic, alexic and achromatopsic, although he was able to remember and describe visual attributes of objects from long-term memory. His disorder was defined as integrative agnosia since his object recognition deficit seems to derive from an inability to organise global forms from local features, especially when there are multiple objects in the scene. HJA's inability to combine image features is illustrated by his performance with silhouetted images of objects. HJA suffered a posterior cerebral artery stroke peri-operatively in 1981 when aged 61. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan in 1989 revealed that he has bilateral lesions of the inferior temporal gyrus, lateral occipital gyrus, the fusiform gyrus and the lingual gyrus.
