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Handbook of Clinical Neurology 2021Visual imagery allows us to revisit the appearance of things in their absence and to test out virtual combinations of sensory experience. Visual imagery has been linked...
Visual imagery allows us to revisit the appearance of things in their absence and to test out virtual combinations of sensory experience. Visual imagery has been linked to many cognitive processes, such as autobiographical and visual working memory. Imagery also plays symptomatic and mechanistic roles in neurologic and mental disorders and is utilized in treatment. A large network of brain activity spanning frontal, parietal, temporal, and visual cortex is involved in generating and maintain images in mind. The ability to visualize has extreme variations, ranging from completely absent (aphantasia) to photo-like (hyperphantasia). The anatomy and functionality of visual cortex, including primary visual cortex, have been associated with individual differences in visual imagery ability, pointing to a potential correlate for both aphantasia and hyperphantasia. Preliminary evidence suggests that lifelong aphantasia is associated with prosopagnosia and reduction in autobiographical memory; hyperphantasia is associated with synesthesia. Aphantasic individuals can also be highly imaginative and are able to complete many tasks that were previously thought to rely on visual imagery, demonstrating that visualization is only one of many ways of representing things in their absence. The study of extreme imagination reminds us how easily invisible differences can escape detection.
Topics: Humans; Imagination; Memory, Short-Term; Nervous System Physiological Phenomena; Visual Cortex; Visual Perception
PubMed: 33832681
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-821377-3.00012-X -
Indian Journal of Endocrinology and... 2020Nursery rhymes represent the simplest and most innocent form of performance art. 'Humpty-Dumpty' is a popular character of a nursery rhyme. This character denotes a...
Nursery rhymes represent the simplest and most innocent form of performance art. 'Humpty-Dumpty' is a popular character of a nursery rhyme. This character denotes a humanized egg. In medicine, the term 'Humpty-Dumpty syndrome' has been used in many specialities. In neurology, "Humpty-Dumpty" syndrome is used to denote prosopagnosia and in rehabilitation medicine and psychiatry it is used to denote failure of a patient to recover from the psychological trauma of a stressful event in childhood. We believe that the character of "Humpty-Dumpty" potentially represents a patient with Cushing syndrome. In this article we have elaborated the scientific reasons for the same.
PubMed: 33643866
DOI: 10.4103/ijem.IJEM_546_20 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... Nov 2020
Topics: Humans; Pattern Recognition, Visual; Prosopagnosia; Recognition, Psychology
PubMed: 32951850
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2020.08.010 -
Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology Oct 2022Cerebral visual disorders include a range of common and rare deficits. They can be divided into effects on low-, intermediate-, and high-level forms of visual...
Cerebral visual disorders include a range of common and rare deficits. They can be divided into effects on low-, intermediate-, and high-level forms of visual processing. Low-level deficits are various forms of homonymous hemifield scotomata, which affect all types of vision within their borders. Intermediate-level deficits refer to impairments of colour or motion perception, which affect either one hemifield or the entire field when lesions are bilateral. High-level deficits are divided into those of the ventral (occipitotemporal) or dorsal (occipitoparietal) stream. Occipitotemporal lesions affect various aspects of object recognition, ranging from general visual agnosia to selective agnosias, such as prosopagnosia or topographagnosia from right or bilateral lesions, and pure alexia from left-sided lesions. Occipitoparietal lesions cause the various components of Bálint syndrome, namely, simultanagnosia, optic ataxia, and ocular motor apraxia. They can also cause other impairments of visuospatial or visuotemporal processing, such as astereopsis and sequence-agnosia. Because of anatomic proximity, certain deficits cluster together to form a number of cerebral visual syndromes. Treatment of these disorders remains challenging, with frequent reliance on strategic substitutions rather than restorative approaches.
PubMed: 36589033
DOI: 10.4103/aian.aian_136_22 -
Behavioral Sciences (Basel, Switzerland) Aug 2023Children with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, struggle to recognize the faces of acquaintances, which can have a negative impact on their social... (Review)
Review
Children with prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, struggle to recognize the faces of acquaintances, which can have a negative impact on their social interactions and overall functioning. This paper reviews existing research on interventions for children with prosopagnosia, including compensatory and remedial strategies, and provides a summary and comparison of their effectiveness. However, despite the availability of these interventions, their effectiveness remains limited and constrained by various factors. The lack of a widely accepted treatment for children with prosopagnosia emphasizes the need for further research to improve intervention strategies. Last, three future research directions were proposed to improve interventions for prosopagnosia, including ecological approaches, the social challenges faced by children, and new potential intervention methods.
PubMed: 37622816
DOI: 10.3390/bs13080676 -
Neuropsychologia May 2023Acquired prosopagnosia is often associated with other deficits such as dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, from damage to adjacent perceptual networks. A recent study...
BACKGROUND
Acquired prosopagnosia is often associated with other deficits such as dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, from damage to adjacent perceptual networks. A recent study showed that some subjects with developmental prosopagnosia also have congenital amusia, but problems with music perception have not been described with the acquired variant.
OBJECTIVE
Our goal was to determine if music perception was also impaired in subjects with acquired prosopagnosia, and if so, its anatomic correlate.
METHOD
We studied eight subjects with acquired prosopagnosia, all of whom had extensive neuropsychological and neuroimaging testing. They performed a battery of tests evaluating pitch and rhythm processing, including the Montréal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia.
RESULTS
At the group level, subjects with anterior temporal lesions were impaired in pitch perception relative to the control group, but not those with occipitotemporal lesions. Three of eight subjects with acquired prosopagnosia had impaired musical pitch perception while rhythm perception was spared. Two of the three also showed reduced musical memory. These three reported alterations in their emotional experience of music: one reported music anhedonia and aversion, while the remaining two had changes consistent with musicophilia. The lesions of these three subjects affected the right or bilateral temporal poles as well as the right amygdala and insula. None of the three prosopagnosic subjects with lesions limited to the inferior occipitotemporal cortex exhibited impaired pitch perception or musical memory, or reported changes in music appreciation.
CONCLUSION
Together with the results of our previous studies of voice recognition, these findings indicate an anterior ventral syndrome that can include the amnestic variant of prosopagnosia, phonagnosia, and various alterations in music perception, including acquired amusia, reduced musical memory, and subjective reports of altered emotional experience of music.
Topics: Humans; Prosopagnosia; Music; Temporal Lobe; Auditory Perceptual Disorders; Perception; Pitch Perception
PubMed: 36913989
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108540 -
Handbook of Clinical Neurology 2022Face perception is a socially important but complex process with many stages and many facets. There is substantial evidence from many sources that it involves a large... (Review)
Review
Face perception is a socially important but complex process with many stages and many facets. There is substantial evidence from many sources that it involves a large extent of the temporal lobe, from the ventral occipitotemporal cortex and superior temporal sulci to anterior temporal regions. While early human neuroimaging work suggested a core face network consisting of the occipital face area, fusiform face area, and posterior superior temporal sulcus, studies in both humans and monkeys show a system of face patches stretching from posterior to anterior in both the superior temporal sulcus and inferotemporal cortex. Sophisticated techniques such as fMRI adaptation have shown that these face-activated regions show responses that have many of the attributes of human face processing. Lesions of some of these regions in humans lead to variants of prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize the identity of a face. Lesion, imaging, and electrophysiologic data all suggest that there is a segregation between identity and expression processing, though some suggest this may be better characterized as a distinction between static and dynamic facial information.
Topics: Cerebral Cortex; Facial Recognition; Humans; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Prosopagnosia; Temporal Lobe
PubMed: 35964972
DOI: 10.1016/B978-0-12-823493-8.00019-5 -
Cortex; a Journal Devoted To the Study... May 2023COVID-19 can cause psychological problems including loss of smell and taste, long-lasting memory, speech, and language impairments, and psychosis. Here, we provide the...
COVID-19 can cause psychological problems including loss of smell and taste, long-lasting memory, speech, and language impairments, and psychosis. Here, we provide the first report of prosopagnosia following symptoms consistent with COVID-19. Annie is a 28-year-old woman who had normal face recognition prior to contracting COVID-19 in March 2020. Two months later, she noticed face recognition difficulties while experiencing symptom relapses and her deficits with faces have persisted. On two tests of familiar face recognition and two tests of unfamiliar face recognition, Annie showed clear impairments. In contrast, she scored normally on tests assessing face detection, face identity perception, object recognition, scene recognition, and non-visual memory. Navigational deficits frequently co-occur with prosopagnosia, and Annie reports that her navigational abilities are substantially worse than before she became ill. Self-report survey data from 54 respondents with long COVID showed that a majority reported reductions in visual recognition and navigation abilities. In summary, Annie's results indicate that COVID-19 can produce severe and selective neuropsychological impairments similar to deficits seen following brain damage, and it appears that high-level visual impairments are not uncommon in people with long COVID.
Topics: Humans; Female; Adult; Prosopagnosia; Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome; COVID-19; Face; Recognition, Psychology; Pattern Recognition, Visual
PubMed: 36966620
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2023.01.012