De Renzi E, Lucchelli F
Department of Neurology, University of Modena, Italy.
Cortex. 1994 Mar;30(1):3-25. doi: 10.1016/s0010-9452(13)80322-x.
Following herpes encephalitis, a patient showed impaired knowledge of animals, fruits and vegetables, flowers and food (so called living things categories), whatever the modality in which stimuli were presented and responses were given. A series of experiments showed that the deficit specifically affected the ability to retrieve the perceptual features of the living stimuli defining their shape, while knowledge of their functional-encyclopedic properties was preserved. The patient had no problems with man-made objects, except when the recall of their colour, or the identification of their sound was requested. It is argued that the retrieval of the perceptual features was potentially disrupted for every type of category, but that the block was compensated for man-made objects, because the close correspondence between shape and function that characterises them provided an alternative route to access their structured form representations. On this account, the selective deficit for living categories seems contingent on the interaction between an overall cognitive impairment--the deficit in retrieving perceptual features--and some intrinsic properties of the stimulus--the factors that have modelled its form--and cannot be taken as evidence that semantic systems are allotted to separate cerebral areas.
在患疱疹性脑炎后，一名患者对动物、水果和蔬菜、花卉及食物（即所谓的生物类别）的认知出现障碍，无论刺激呈现方式及反应方式如何。一系列实验表明，这种缺陷特别影响了提取定义生物形状的感知特征的能力，而对其功能百科属性的认知得以保留。除了被要求回忆人造物体的颜色或识别其声音时，该患者对人造物体没有问题。有人认为，各类别的感知特征提取都可能受到干扰，但对人造物体来说这种阻碍得到了弥补，因为其形状与功能之间的紧密对应关系为获取其结构化形式表征提供了另一条途径。据此，生物类别的选择性缺陷似乎取决于整体认知障碍（提取感知特征的缺陷）与刺激的某些固有属性（塑造其形式的因素）之间的相互作用，不能被视为语义系统分配到不同脑区的证据。
