Visual Agnosia Revisited

Extract

Visual Agnosia (Second Edition). Martha J. Farah (Ed.). 2005. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press/Bradford Books, 192 pp., $25.00 (PB).

Martha Farah published her influential volume Visual Agnosia in 1990. As she notes in the Preface to the second edition of this book, she undertook the project in the interest of “reviewing and systematizing the case literature and posing some basic questions that could, in principle, be answered by such cases.” The first edition of Visual Agnosia accomplished her objectives. From the extraordinarily rich but often confusing body of neuropsychological data, Dr. Farah developed a comprehensive account of visual processing disorders that was both true to the clinical phenomena and informed by then-current accounts of normal vision. Her short monograph quickly gained a wide audience and has become a standard reference. It has occupied a readily accessible spot on my bookshelf for years.