[Multimodal or multisensorial agnosia?]

A 75 year-old right handed woman had persistent right homonymous hemianopia and alexia without agraphia caused by a haemorrhagic stroke of the left occipito-temporal region. Six months later she suffered sudden onset visual and auditory agnosia, following a second haematoma, contralateral to the first one, in the right occipito-temporal region including the lingual and fusiform gyri. None of the disorders concerned semantic representation, so that an asemantic agnosia was excluded. Her performance in naming and recognition tests, in both visual and auditory modalities, demonstrated a wide range of responses and errors. The pattern of visual symptoms suggested "associative visual agnosia narrow sense" (Farah, 1990); auditory agnosia concerned only the non verbal stimuli. These findings were discussed in terms of anatomical mechanisms subserving perceptual, semantical, visuo and auditory-verbal representation. In this case, visual and auditory, agnosia appears to be independent.