WHY LEOPARDS NEVER CHANGE THEIR SPOTS: A REPLY TO MOSS, TYLER, AND JENNINGS

Laws, Evans, Hodges, and McCarthy (1995) documented a selective impairment for associative knowledge about living things in the post-encephalitic patient SE. By contrast, Moss, Tyler, and Jennings (1997) recently described a selective loss of visual knowledge for living things in the same patient. The apparent contradiction in these papers highlights novel and critical methodological issues in the study of category-specific disorders. A main contention of this paper is that Moss et al.'s data do not meet sufficient conditions for demonstrating a category-specific naming deficit for living things. One implication of this is that their experiments may suffer from a confounding variable that encourages an underestimation of SE's visual knowledge. Finally, it is argued that Moss et al.'s theoretical interpretation of SE's deficit receives no empirical support.