Martha Farah shows how a potentially impenetrable topic, visual agnosia, can be unpacked and analyzed in a captivating way. Her classic work of 15 years ago is now updated and fleshed out so thorougly that it is almost a new book. It is a must-read.
Michael S. Gazzaniga, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Dartmouth College
The study of visual agnosia is basic to efforts to integrate cognitive and neuroscience approaches to object recognition. The Farah reeview is an excellent example of this approach.
Michael I. Posner, Professor of Psychology, University of Oregon
A superb introduction to the topic of visual deficits following brains damage. In surveying this vast literature, Farah does not merely dump a mass of contraditory data in the reader's lap, but succeeds in organizing and synthesizing the data in a sensible way. This is a nicely reasoned and well written book, and it should be an invaluable resource for cognitive neuroscientists.
Steven Pinker, MIT
A fresh look at agnosia by someone who is well versed in current psychological and computational theory. Sometimes the best insights into the workings of a compex system come from studying its abilities following discrete damage. Martha Farah has given us a fascinating account of the abilitiees of a broken visual recognition system.
Robert Desimone, Head of the Unit of Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory of Neuropsychology, NIMH
Farah presents a lucid and scholarly overview of the visual agnosias; those fascinating and enigmatic disorders of perception that arise from focal brain damage. She examines the problem from the vantage point of a cognitive psychologist and manages to provide a clear distillate of what has historically been a complex and confusing subject.
V.S Ramachandra, Department of Psychology, University of California, La Jolla
I started reading this book expecting to be interested; I finished several hours later feeling exhilirated. Farah develops a general methodology to relate studies of brain-damaged patients to functional and computational theories, and illustrates her percepts with a masterly account of agnosia and its implications for theories of object perception. She brings order to a mass of untidy, often conflicting data, while allowing them to guide her understanding. Every page is rewarding; I was never tempted to skip a section for fear of missing an interesting observation, a new interpretation or prediction. Whether or not one agress with all her ideas, they are reliably interesting and plausible. The combination of careful description with novel and insightful interpretations within a coherent integrative framework makes this book a model for future cognititve neuroscience.
Anne Treisman, PH.D., F.R.S., Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley
