[The syndrome of auditory agnosia. A case report and an attempt of neuropsychological qualification (author's transl)].

Proceeding from the neuropsychological examination of a patient with an exceptionally selective impairment of auditory gnosis of vascular origin, we make an attempt to analyze structurally the syndrome of auditory agnosia, a study of which has been neglected in comparison with analyses of visual agnosia. In our analysis we refer to 28 case reports, documented in the literature. Decisive syndromal points of view are: a) there is an absence of significant audiological deficiencies; b) errors of the acoustic-discriminative type prevail in auditory-visual matching tasks; c) the gnostic deficit is modality specific; d) the same items are variably reproduced on repeated presentation; e) there is marked fluctuation of performance; f) there is exceptional irreversibility of the impairment; g) amusia is a more or less obligatory accompanying phenomenon; h) in cases of vascular origin there is always a history of repeated temporal lobe damage, this damage being predominantly in the form of bilateral lesions. This analysis indicates a close structural analogy to the syndrome of perceptive visual agnosia. We place great importance in the relationship between approaches and models of cognitive psychology (Neisser, 1967) which we see as important for further theoretical development in neuropsychology.