About visual amnesia

What is visual amnesia?

Primary visual agnosia is a rare neurological disorder characterized by the total or partial loss of the ability to recognize and identify familiar objects and/or people by sight. This occurs without loss of the ability to actually see the object or person. The symptoms of visual agnosia occur as a result of damage to certain areas of the brain (primary) or in association with other disorders (secondary).

What are the symptoms for visual amnesia?

Visual memory-deficit amnesia is caused by damage to areas of the visual system that store visual information.
Because it is caused by a deficit in access to stored visual material and not by an impaired ability to encode or retrieve new material, it has the otherwise infrequent properties of a more severe retrograde than anterograde amnesia with no temporal gradient in the retrograde amnesia.
Of the number of cases of long-term visual Memory loss found in the literature, all had amnesia extending beyond a loss of visual memory, often including a near total loss of pre-traumatic episodic memory.
Of the 60% cases in which both the severity of retrograde and anterograde amnesia and the temporal gradient of the retrograde amnesia were noted, 40% had a more severe retrograde amnesia with no temporal gradient

Symptoms of visual amnesia:
The primary symptom of visual amnesia is Memory loss or the inability to form new memories. If you have amnesia, you may experience the following:
•Difficulty recalling facts, events, places, or specific details (which can range from what you ate this morning to the name of the current president)
•An impaired ability to learn new information
Confusion
•An inability to recognize locations or faces
•Confabulation, in which your brain subconsciously invents false memories to fill in memory gaps

Symptoms
A deficit in access to stored visual material and not by an impaired ability to encode or retrieve new material
Condition
Difficulty recalling facts, events, places, or specific details,An impaired ability to learn new information,Confusion
Drugs
Occupational therapy to teach you strategies to organize information

What are the causes for visual amnesia?

Visual amnesia is caused by damage to areas of the visual system that store visual information.
Because it is caused by a deficit in access to stored visual material and not by an impaired ability to encode or retrieve new material, it has the otherwise infrequent properties of a more severe retrograde than anterograde amnesia with no temporal gradient in the retrograde amnesia.
Of the number of cases of long-term visual memory loss found in the literature, all had amnesia extending beyond a loss of visual memory, often including a near total loss of pre-traumatic episodic memory.
Of the 60% cases in which both the severity of retrograde and anterograde amnesia and the temporal gradient of the retrograde amnesia were noted, 40% had a more severe retrograde amnesia with no temporal gradient.

Etiology:
1. In the 11 patients with long-term visual memory loss is mixed with four closed-head injuries, three cerebrovascular accidents, one encephalitis or cerebrovascular accident, one colloid cyst, and one cerebral atrophy aggravated by alcoholism.
2. As would be expected from the presence of visual deficits, the damage in these 11 patients tended to include the occipital lobes.
3. Of the 7 cases that based their lesion information on a brain scan, 6 have bilateral occipital damage, and 1 has right occipital damage.
4. Three of the 7 cases with brain scans reported trauma to the inferotemporal region, which may contain convergence zones for the visual system.
5. Two additional cases reported damage to both the occipital and temporal lobes, suggesting that inferotemporal trauma might exist.

Symptoms
A deficit in access to stored visual material and not by an impaired ability to encode or retrieve new material
Condition
Difficulty recalling facts, events, places, or specific details,An impaired ability to learn new information,Confusion
Drugs
Occupational therapy to teach you strategies to organize information

What are the risk factors for visual amnesia?

Patients with a loss of long-term visual memory cannot access stored visual information at all, so according to the consensus models of memory and amnesia, they should not be able to support the coactivation underlying memory. In Farah’s model, a patient must satisfy three criteria to be classified as a case of long-term visual memory loss.

(i) The patient must be able to detect, draw, or describe the visual properties of an object that is present, which demonstrates that the deficit could not have arisen from motor, perceptual, or linguistic impairment.
(ii) The patient must not be able to recognize an object on sight alone, either by indicating its name or its function. The first two criteria define the patient as associative visual agnosia.
(iii) The patient should not be able to draw an object from memory (though some simplistic drawings are allowed), describe its visual characteristics from memory, or detect its visual image upon introspection. The third criterion helps isolate the deficit as one of long-term visual memory.
Common risk factors for visual amnesia include-
1. Any triggers such as surgery or head injury
2. When the memory issues started
3. Alcohol and drug use
4. Family history
5. History of cancer, depression, headaches, or seizures

Symptoms
A deficit in access to stored visual material and not by an impaired ability to encode or retrieve new material
Condition
Difficulty recalling facts, events, places, or specific details,An impaired ability to learn new information,Confusion
Drugs
Occupational therapy to teach you strategies to organize information

Video related to visual amnesia