ABSTRACT
Covert recognition, apparent knowledge without consciousness, has been described in several cognitive disorders, including pure alexia. Patients have been documented who cannot name briefly presented words, but can make semantic categorisation and lexical decisions to a degree of accuracy above chance. Here, we describe a simple connectionist model which, when lesioned, demonstrates many of the performance characteristics of pure alexia, including covert recognition. It is concluded that covert recognition can be explained in terms of the functioning of a damaged processing system, and it is not necessary to assume a disconnection of a normally functioning system from conscious expression.
