Some of the most fascinating deficits in neuropsychology concern the failure to recognise common objects from one semantic category, such as living things, when there is no such difficulty with objects from another, such as non-living things. Over the past twenty years, numerous cases of these 'category specific' recognition and naming problems have been documented and several competing theories have been developed to account for the patients' disorders. Category Specificity in Brain and Mind draws together the neuropsychological literature on category-specific impairments, with research on how children develop knowledge about different categories, functional brain imaging work and computational models of object recognition and semantic memory. The chapters are written by internationally leading psychologists and neuroscientists and the result is a review of the most up-to-date thinking on how knowledge about different categories is acquired and organized in the mind, and where it is represented in the human brain.
The text will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and researchers in the field of category specificity and a rich source of information for neuropsychologists, experimental and developmental psychologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers.
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List of Contributors. Preface. L.R. Santos, A. Caramazza, The Domain-specific Hypothesis: A Developmental and Comparative Perspective on Category-specific Deficits. G. Sartori, R. Job, S. Zago, A Case of Domain-specific Semantic Deficit. G.W. Humphreys, M.J. Riddoch, E.M.E. Forde, The Principle of Target-competitor Differentiation in Object Recognition and Naming. M. Arguin, Visual Processing and the Dissociation between Biological and Man-made Categories. H.E. Moss, L.K. Tyler, J.T. Devlin, The Emergence of Category-specific Deficits in a Distributed Semantic System. P. Garrard, M.A. Lambon-Ralph, J.R. Hodges, Semantic Dementia: A Category-specific Paradox. C. Whatmough, H. Chertkow, Category-specific Recognition Impairments in Alzheimer's Disease. K. McRae, G.S. Cree, Factors Underlying Category-specific Impairments. T.T. Rogers, D.C. Plaut, Connectionist Perspectives on Category-Specific Deficits. K. Lamberts, L. Shapiro, Exemplar Models and Category-specific Deficits. J.M. Mandler, On the Foundations of the Semantic System. K. Subrahmanyam, R. Gelman, A. Lafosse, Distinguishing Between Animates and Other Worldly Things. F. Keil, N.S. Kim, M.L. Grief, Categories and Levels of Information. G. Gainotti, The Relationships Between Anatomical and Cognitive Locus of Lesion in Category-specific Disorders for Living and Non-Living Things. C. Price, K. Friston, Functional Imaging Studies of Category-Specificity.
