When joys come not in single spies but in battalions: Within-category and within-modality identification increases the accessibility of degraded stored knowledge

Abstract

A single case study is presented of a patient with a modality-specific problem in visual object recognition, which can be linked to impaired stored descriptions for objects. The impairment was consistent across items over time, suggesting degraded structural representations for objects. Interestingly, visual object recognition was improved by priming when several pictures of objects from the same category were presented simultaneously, relative to when the pictures were from different categories. Object recognition in the primed condition was greater than would be expected by guessing from the category label, and it was greater than when words replaced the prime pictures. The data indicate that degraded structural descriptions can be recovered by priming from items within the same category and modality. We discuss the implications of the results for understanding the relations between access and representation disorders in neuropsychology, the nature of our semantic representations of objects, and the means by which within-category priming occurs.