[A case of predominantly right-temporal lobe atrophy with disturbance of identifying familiar faces].

A right-handed 72-year-old man (I.K.) who complained of difficulty identifying familiar faces was investigated on a series of tests of face perception (face matching, recognition of age and sex, and meaning of facial expressions), facial identity (faces of families and famous persons as retrograde ones and his doctor's faces as anterograde ones) and other neuropsychological abilities. His scores of face perception tests were normal or mildly disturbed. His memory performances measured with WMS-R and Rey-Osterrieth figure were normal. But he could identify none of anterograde and retrograde faces and failed to experience any familiarity with those faces. In addition, he could not recognize none of voices of family members and a doctor, despite of being able to recognize about the age and sex of voice. On the other hand, he could describe personalities of his family members and doctors, but knew none of famous people. Memory for personal events in the recent and remote past was well preserved, while that for social events was severely disturbed in both past. In addition to impairment of identification of familiar faces, he had severe problems with identifying famous common buildings and animals. He also presented Gogi (word meaning) aphasia and impairment of semantic memory for some common objects. Tyrrell et al. reported a similar case and McNeil et al. examined the patient on covert recognition of face in detail. On their task, he showed no covert effects and they attributed the result to impairment of face recognition units themselves. Their way of thinking seems to give an explanation of I.K.'s disturbance of anterograde and retrograde memory for faces.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)