mindblindness

   Also known as psychic blindness, soulblindness, and visual agnosia. All four terms are used to denote the inability or diminished ability to process certain aspects of the visual input, resulting, for example, in the inability to recognize faces (i.e. prosopagnosia), objects, or situations. The German term Seelenblindheit (i.e. soul blindness) was coined in or shortly before 1881 by the German physiologist Hermann Munk (1839-1912) to denote a condition induced experimentally in dogs by surgically removing parts of the visual cortex. Munk's discovery was applied clinically to the human situation by the German neurologist HeinrichLissauer(1861-1891). Traditionally, mindblindness is attributed to lesions and/or malfunctioning of areas within the occipital cortex. Lissauer proposed a distinction between apper-ceptive and associative mindblindness. Appercep-tive mindblindness was conceptualized by him as the inability to integrate various visual elements into a single, coherent whole or percept. Associative mindblindness was envisaged by him as the inability to integrate a visual percept with information from the other sensory modalities, thus leading to a failure of prelinguistic object representation. A second and rather different connotation of the term mindblindness was introduced in or shortly before 1990 by the British neuroscien-tist Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen uses the term to designate the autistic lack of a theory of mind.

   References

   Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness. An essay on autism and theory of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

   Lissauer, H. (1890). Ein Fall von Seelenblindheit. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 21, 222-270.