J Cogn Neurosci. 1993 Winter;5(1):118-28. doi: 10.1162/jocn.1993.5.1.118.
Abstract Patients with visual associative agnosia have a particular difficulty in identifying visually presented living things (plants and animals) as opposed to nonliving things. It has been claimed that this effect cannot be explained by differences in the inherent visual discriminability of living and nonliving things. To test this claim further, we performed two experiments with normal subjects. In Experiment 1 normal human observers were asked to identify objects in tachistoscopically presented line drawings. They made more errors with living things than with nonliving things. In Experiment 2 normal monkeys learned to discriminate among the same line drawings for food reward. They made many more errors in discriminating among living things than nonliving things. Agnosic patients' responses to the same line drawings were made available to us for correlative analysis with the subjects' responses to these drawings in Experiments 1 and 2. We conclude that a category-specific visual agnosia for living things can arise as a consequence of a modality-specific but not category-specific impairment in visual representation, since living things are more similar to each other visually than nonliving things are.
摘要
视觉联想性认知障碍患者在识别视觉呈现的生物（植物和动物）与非生物方面存在特殊困难。有人声称，这种影响不能用生物和非生物在固有视觉可辨别性上的差异来解释。为了进一步验证这一说法，我们对正常受试者进行了两项实验。在实验 1 中，正常人类观察者被要求在速示器呈现的线条图中识别物体。他们对生物的错误识别率高于非生物。在实验 2 中，正常猴子为了食物奖励而学习辨别这些相同的线条图。他们在辨别生物时的错误明显多于非生物。我们获得了认知障碍患者对同一组线条图的反应，并将其与实验 1 和实验 2 中受试者对这些线条图的反应进行了相关分析。我们的结论是，对生物的特定类别视觉认知障碍可能是由于特定于感觉模态但不是特定于类别的视觉表现损伤而产生的，因为生物在视觉上彼此之间比非生物更为相似。
