Multimodal agnosia after unilateral left hemisphere lesion.

Agnosia is an abnormality of recognition that is not explained by sensory or cognitive disorders. We studied a patient who had combined visual-tactile agnosia without prosopagnosia after a left hemisphere infarct. Although he copied figures presented visually and he performed intramodal or crossmodal visual-tactile matches, he could not indicate recognition by either sight or touch. The lesion involved areas of the occipital and temporal lobes that may be important for human performance of tasks that require construction and application of meaning to percepts presented both visually and tactually.