Progressive defective recognition of familiar people

Abstract This paper describes a right-handed patient (Maria), with a mild cognitive deterioration, who demonstrated the neuropsychological deficits of progressive bi-temporal atrophy. Temporal atrophy was ascertained by repeated MRI scanning. The patient was first assessed 54 years from clinical onset. The first 2/½ years were hallmarked by a worsening impairment of recognizing and identifying familiar people, which at our last assessment (13 months after the first) were very severe. Extra-facial information provided via conversation, gestures or clothes failed to counter the recognition defect. When given the names of the unrecognized familiar people, she had no difficulty retrieving the relevant biographical information. By contrast, hearing the name did not appear to help her to retrieve the corresponding visuo-perceptual characteristics. Two years post-onset, a milder, multisensorial defect of object recognition began to develop. During the last 6 months of observation, increasing lexico-semantic and ...