Partial recovery from visual object agnosia: a 10 year follow-up study.

We describe a young woman, J.R., who sustained a very severe head injury in 1981 at the age of 17 years. She was assessed in 1982 and found to have visual agnosia. Since then J.R. has been assessed on several occasions over a period of ten years. Her agnosia for real objects has resolved and she has improved on the identification of other classes of stimuli. However, she still has some problems with the identification of line drawings, photographs and model animals. Her drawing from memory remains particularly poor and she has difficulty with visual imagery. We consider her residual deficits in the light of Farah's (1990) theoretical framework; this proposes that associative agnosia could be due to a disconnection syndrome, a loss of stored visual representations or to the loss of knowledge of how to perceive objects. J.R.'s residual impairments appear to be mainly due to a loss of access to visual representations in the absence of visual input.