This was the first evidence for a double dissociation between face and object processing suggesting a face-specific processing system. In popular culture
A famous report on this condition is the title essay of Oliver Sacks book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The murder suspect in the Picket Fences episode "Strangers" supposedly had agnosia. The patient in the House episode "Adverse Events" had agnosia. In the graphic novel Preacher, the character Lorie has an extreme version of agnosia resulting from being born with a single eye. For example, she perceives Arseface, a man with severe facial deformities, as resembling a young James Dean. Val Kilmers character has visual agnosia in the film At First Sight. In "Folie à Deux", a fifth-season episode of The X-Files, Mulder succumbs to the same belief as telemarketer Gary Lambert, that his boss Greg Pincus is a monster who disguises his true appearance by means of hypnosis. Scully, although believing this notion preposterous, suggests that what Mulder describes is analogous to an induced visual agnosia. The short story "Liking What You See: A Documentary" by Ted Chiang examines the cultural effects of a noninvasive medical procedure that induces a visual agnosia toward physical beauty. In the manga and anime Odd Taxi, the main character Odokawa has agnosia, which causes him to see himself and everyone around him as an animal. See also
References
Further reading
Cant JD, Goodale MA (March 2007). "Attention to form or surface properties modulates different regions of human occipitotemporal cortex". Cereb. Cortex. 17 (3): 713–31. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhk022. PMID 16648452.
is able to identify parts of objects but cannot generate a whole representation. It should not be surprising then that his visual imagery for object size, shape, and color is intact. For example, when shown a picture of an animal, he can correctly answer questions such as "are the ears up or down?" and "is the tail long or short?" He can correctly identify colors, for example that the inside of a cantaloupe is orange. Finally, C.K. can generate internal images and perceive these generated objects. For example, Finke, Pinker, and Farah instructed C.K. to imagine a scenario where a B is rotated 90 degrees to the left, a triangle is put below, and the line in the middle is removed. C.K. can correctly identify this object as a heart by picturing this transformation in his head. Evidence for double dissociation between face and object processing
Patient C.K. provided evidence for a double dissociation between face processing and visual object processing. Patients with prosopagnosia have damage to the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and are unable to recognize upright faces. C.K. has no difficulty with face processing and matches the performance of controls when tasked with identifying upright famous faces. When shown inverted faces of famous people, C.K. performs significantly worse than controls. This is because processing inverted faces involves a piecemeal strategy. C.K.s performance is compared to patients with prosopagnosia who are impaired in face processing but perform well identifying inverted faces.