Intact verbal description of letters with diminished awareness of their forms

Abstract

Visual processing and its conscious awareness can be dissociated. To examine the extent of dissociation between ability to read characters or words and to be consciously aware of their forms, reading ability and conscious awareness for characters were examined using a tachistoscope in an alexic patient. A right handed woman with 14 years of education presented with incomplete right hemianopia, alexia with kanji (ideogram) agraphia, anomia, and amnesia. Brain MRI disclosed cerebral infarction limited to the left lower bank of the calcarine fissure, lingual and parahippocampal gyri, and an old infarction in the right medial frontal lobe. Tachistoscopic examination disclosed that she could read characters aloud in the right lower hemifield when she was not clearly aware of their forms and only noted their presence vaguely. Although her performance in reading kanji was better in the left than the right field, she could read kana (phonogram) characters and Arabic numerals equally well in both fields. By contrast, she claimed that she saw only a flash of light in 61% of trials and noticed vague forms of stimuli in 36% of trials. She never recognised a form of a letter in the right lower field precisely. She performed judgment tasks better in the left than right lower hemifield where she had to judge whether two kana characters were the same or different. Although dissociation between performance of visual recognition tasks and conscious awareness of the visual experience was found in patients with blindsight or residual vision, reading (verbal identification) of characters without clear awareness of their forms has not been reported in clinical cases. Diminished awareness of forms in our patient may reflect incomplete input to the extrastriate cortex.