How does agnosia affect the brain?
24965027#24
Agnosia is a rare occurrence and can be the result of a stroke, dementia, head injury, brain infection, or hereditary.
Apperceptive agnosia is a deficit in object perception creating an inability to understand the significance of objects.
Similarly, associative visual agnosia is the inability to understand the significance of objects; however, this time the deficit is in semantic memory. Both of these agnosias can affect the pathway to object recognition, like Marr's Theory of Vision. More specifically unlike apperceptive agnosia, associative agnosic patients are more successful at drawing, copying, and matching tasks; however, these patients demonstrate that they can perceive but not recognize.
Integrative agnosia(a subtype of associative agnosia) is the inability to integrate separate parts to form a whole image. With these types of agnosias there is damage to the ventral (what) stream of the visual processing pathway.
Object orientation agnosia is the inability to extract the orientation of an object despite adequate object recognition. With this type of agnosia there is damage to the dorsal (where) stream of the visual processing pathway.
This can affect object recognition in terms of familiarity and even more so in unfamiliar objects and viewpoints.
A difficulty in recognizing faces can be explained by prosopagnosia. Someone with prosopagnosia cannot identify the face but is still able to perceive age, gender, and emotional expression. The brain region that specifies in facial recognition is the fusiform face area. Prosopagnosia can also be divided into apperceptive and associative subtypes. Recognition of individual chairs, cars, animals can also be impaired; therefore, these object share similar perceptual features with the face that are recognized in the fusiform face area.
Cognitive neuroscience of visual object recognition
5366050#24
Agnosia is "the loss or diminution of the ability to recognize familiar objects or stimuli usually as a result of brain damage". There are several different kinds of agnosia that affect every one of our senses, but the two most common related to speech are speech agnosia and phonagnosia.
Speech perception
17290104#9
Each patient that suffers from apperceptive agnosia does not have brain damage in exactly the same area. However, brain damage in proximity to the occipital lobe is largely correlated with the patterns of deficit seen in apperceptive agnosics. For example, patient JB suffered extensive damage to the parietal-occipital areas to the left cerebral hemisphere leading to his deficit in the ability to name distinguish between structurally similar object.
Apperceptive agnosia
169509#0
Agnosia is the inability to process sensory information. Often there is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss. It is usually associated with brain injury or neurological illness, particularly after damage to the occipitotemporal border, which is part of the ventral stream. Agnosia only affects a single modality, such as vision or hearing. More recently, a top-down interruption is considered to cause the disturbance of handling perceptual information.
Agnosia
169509#5
Agnosia can result from strokes, dementia, or other neurological disorders. It may also be trauma-induced by a head injury, brain infection, or hereditary. Additionally, some forms of agnosia may be the result of developmental disorders. Damage causing agnosia usually occurs in either the occipital or parietal lobes of the brain. Although one modality may be affected, cognitive abilities in other areas are preserved.
Agnosia
15670228#0
Integrative agnosia is a sub-disease of agnosia, meaning the lack of integrating perceptual wholes within 
knowledge. Integrative agnosia can be assessed by several experimental tests such as the Efron shape test, which 
determines the specificity of the disease being Integrative. 
This disease is often caused by brain trauma, producing medial ventral lesions to the extrastriate cortex. Affecting this region of the brain produces learning impairments: the inability to 
integrate parts such as spatial distances or producing visual images from short or long-term memory.
Integrative agnosia
3452485#1
Agnosia is the inability to recognize certain objects, persons or sounds. Agnosia is typically caused by damage to the brain (most commonly in the occipital or parietal lobes) or from a neurological disorder. Treatments vary depending on the location and cause of the damage. Recovery is possible depending on the severity of the disorder and the severity of the damage to the brain. Many more specific types of agnosia diagnoses exist, including: associative visual agnosia, astereognosis, auditory agnosia, auditory verbal agnosia, prosopagnosia, simultanagnosia, topographical disorientation, visual agnosia etc.
Memory disorder
2195324#21
The affected individual may not realize that they have a visual problem and may complain of becoming "clumsy" or "muddled" when performing familiar tasks such as setting the table or simple DIY.
Anosognosia, a lack of awareness of the deficit, is common and can cause therapeutic resistance. In some agnosias, such as prosopagnosia, awareness of the deficit is often present; however shame and embarrassment regarding the symptoms can be a barrier in admission of a deficiency. Because agnosias result from brain lesions, no direct treatment for them currently exists, and intervention is aimed at utilization of coping strategies by patients and those around them. Sensory compensation can also develop after one modality is impaired in agnostics
Associative visual agnosia
34008216#0
Social-emotional agnosia, also known as emotional agnosia or expressive agnosia, is the inability to perceive facial expressions, body language, and voice intonation. A person with this disorder is unable to non-verbally perceive others' emotions in social situations, limiting normal social interactions. The condition causes a functional blindness to subtle non-verbal social-emotional cues in voice, gesture, and facial expression. People with this form of agnosia have difficulty in determining and identifying the motivational and emotional significance of external social events, and may appear emotionless or agnostic (uncertainty or general indecisiveness about a particular thing). Symptoms of this agnosia can vary depending on the area of the brain affected. Social-emotional agnosia often occurs in individuals with schizophrenia and autism. It is difficult to distinguish from, and has been found to co-occur with, alexithymia.
Social-emotional agnosia
2195324#5
Damage to the left hemisphere of the brain has been explicitly implicated in the associative form of visual agnosia. Goldberg suggested that the associative visual form of agnosia results from damage to the ventral stream of the brain, the occipito-temporal stream, which plays a key role in object recognition as the so-called "what" region of the brain, as opposed to the "where," dorsal stream.
Associative visual agnosia