ABSTRACT
Dissociations between perception and awareness of perception have been reported in a variety of neuropsychological disorders (see Farah, 1994, for a review). These dissociations are of great interest for what they can tell us about the neural correlates of perceptual awareness: What does the brain need to enable conscious, aware perception that it does not need to enable unconscious perception? One of the best-studied and most dramatic perception/awareness dissociations is found in prosopagnosia. This chapter reviews the evidence on unconscious, or “covert,” recognition in prosopagnosia; proposes a new explanation for the phenomenon, which has been implemented in a connectionist computer simulation; and attempts to discriminate among the different explanations. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of each of these explanations of covert recognition for the neural correlates of conscious awareness.
