PERSON-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE OF BIOLOGICAL CATEGORIES

We report new findings from a neurological case described by Hanley, Young, and Pearson (1989). In the original study, the patient, BD, had impaired biographical knowledge of people which appeared to extend to a general impairment of knowledge of “ living things” . In more recent work, we present evidence which confirms Hanley et al.’ s finding that BD has impaired person-specific knowledge, but we suggest that this is not associated with a more general impairment to do with knowledge of biological categories. We propose that an artefactual explanation of the original account is more likely based on differences in “ age of acquisition” between items from “ living” and “ nonliving” categories. We conclude that biographical knowledge of people is represented separately from knowledge of biological categories in semantic memory.

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