Can the recognition of living things really be selectively impaired?

Brain damage sometimes impairs recognition of living things relative to nonliving things. One interpretation of this dissociation is that recognition of living things depends on specialized mechanisms not used for the recognition of nonliving things; another is that patients have damage to a general purpose system, and recognition of living things taxes this system more heavily. Farah et al., (Neuropsychologia, Vol. 29, pp. 185-193, 1991 [7]) found that a set of general factors did not account for patients' impaired recognition of living things; thus they favored the specialized mechanisms account. The current paper builds on Ref. [7] in two ways. First, other research suggests a number of additional factors that might account for the results in Ref. [7] but were not tested there. Second, statistical methods in Ref. [7] may have implicitly favored the conclusion obtained there, so we use more conservative methods. The current work accounts for all these things, and finds that recognition of living things is still disproportionately impaired. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.