Elsevier

Cortex

Volume 47, Issue 4, April 2011, Pages 514-518
Cortex

Discussion forum
Mental imagery in congenital prosopagnosia: A reply to Grüter et al.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2010.11.005Get rights and content

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The size of our case series

Grüter et al. (this issue) take issue with the size of our case series – namely they imply that their 2009 study may be more valid as it has a larger sample, in that Tree and Wilkie (2010) report a case series of four CP individuals, rather than a large group study. In order to respond to the criticism, it is perhaps worth putting the research of Tree and Wilkie (2010) into the wider context of the field of cognitive neuropsychology, since this is my background. This will illustrate that the

The diagnostic ‘criteria’ for classifying cases as CP

Grüter et al. used a semi-structured interview form administered by a physician or psychologist to identify or ‘diagnose’ CP. Grüter et al. also report that this interview procedure has been verified by a face recognition battery in a subgroup of CP cases, and it is implied that such a procedure might be better than that used in Tree and Wilkie (2010). I would respond with the following comments.

Firstly, we never took issue with the primary ‘diagnosis’ of CP in their initial study, although

The visual imagery assessment methodology utilised in our study

This point centres on how one might actually define and measure “mental imagery” – and I would certainly agree that this remains a controversial issue. Tree and Wilkie (2010) chose to approach the issue of mental imagery along some well-established lines of previous research. The key issue, as I see it, is the degree to which a mental ‘image’ is an experience that resembles to some extent the actual experience of perceiving the ‘imaged’ item. In other words, when someone is asked to imagine a

The control sample we used with respect to their vividness ratings

In their commentary Grüter et al. suggest that our control group has vividness ratings that are “the lowest average score for visual mental imagery ever found in a normal sample (for a metastudy see McKelvie, 1995)” (see p. 5) – but it is not clear why such a comment has been made given there were important differences between the ‘vividness’ testing of Tree and Wilkie (2010) and other research that has administered the Marks Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (MVIQ, Marks, 1973) and

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    The ventral stream is composed of associative interconnected cortical areas specialised for colour, face, object, and letter vision (the ‘what’ stream) (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982). Patients with an impairment of the ventral cortex and its connections present with selective loss of colour vision (i.e., achromatopsia) (Zeki, 1990), face perception (i.e., prosopagnosia) (Fox et al., 2008; Ramon and Rossion, 2010; Tree and Wilkie, 2010; Grüter et al., 2011; Tree, 2011), object perception (i.e., visual object agnosia) (Catani et al., 2003, Germine et al., 2011), and words (i.e., alexia) (Cohen et al., 2000). Similarly colour, object, and text or letter-string hallucinations are each linked to pathology causing hyperfunctioning of their respective region of cortical specialisation.

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