Associative visual agnosia is a form of visual agnosia. It is an impairment in recognition or assigning meaning to a stimulus that is accurately perceived and not associated with a generalized deficit in intelligence, memory, language or attention. The disorder appears to be very uncommon in a "pure" or uncomplicated form and is usually accompanied by other complex neuropsychological problems due to the nature of the etiology. Affected individuals can accurately distinguish the object, as demonstrated by the ability to draw a picture of it or categorize accurately, yet they are unable to identify the object, its features or its functions.

Agnosias are sensory modality specific, usually classified as visual, auditory, or tactile. Associative visual agnosia refers to a subtype of visual agnosia, which was labeled by Lissauer (1890), as an inability to connect the visual percept (mental representation of something being perceived through the senses) with its related semantic information stored in memory, such as, its name, use, and description. This is distinguished from the visual apperceptive form of visual agnosia, apperceptive visual agnosia, which is an inability to produce a complete percept, and is associated with a failure in higher order perceptual processing where feature integration is impaired, though individual features can be distinguished. In reality, patients often fall between both distinctions, with some degree of perceptual disturbances exhibited in most cases, and in some cases, patients may be labeled as integrative agnostics when they fit the criteria for both forms. Associative visual agnosias are often category-specific, where recognition of particular categories of items are differentially impaired, which can affect selective classes of stimuli, larger generalized groups or multiple intersecting categories. For example, deficits in recognizing stimuli can be as specific as familiar human faces or as diffuse as living things or non-living things.

An agnosia that affects hearing, auditory sound agnosia, is broken into subdivisions based on level of processing impaired, and a semantic-associative form is investigated within the auditory agnosias.

Associative visual agnosias are generally attributed to anterior left temporal lobe infarction (at the left inferior temporal gyrus), caused by ischemic stroke, head injury, cardiac arrest, brain tumour, brain hemorrhage, or demyelination. Environmental toxins and pathogens have also been implicated, such as, carbon monoxide poisoning or herpes encephalitis and infrequent developmental occurrences have been documented.

Most cases have injury to the occipital and temporal lobes and the critical site of injury appears to be in the left occipito-temporal region, often with involvement of the splenium of the corpus callosum. The etiology of the cognitive impairment, as well the areas of the brain affected by lesions and stage of recovery are the primary determinants of the pattern of deficit. More generalized recognition impairments, such as, animate object deficits, are associated with diffuse hypoxic damage, like carbon monoxide poisoning; more selective deficits are correlated with more isolated damage due to focal stroke.

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.

Teuber described the associative agnostic as having a "percept stripped of its meaning," because the affected individual cannot generate unique semantic information to identify the percept, since though it is fully formed, it fails to activate the semantic memory associated with the stimulus. Warrington (1975) offered that the problem lies in impaired access to generic engrams (memory traces) that describe categories of objects made up of a multitude of similar elements. Essentially, damage to a modality-specific meaning process (semantic system), is proposed, either in terms of defective access to or a degradation of semantic memory store for visual semantic representations themselves. The fact that agnosias are often restricted to impairments of particular types of stimuli, within distinct sensory modalities, suggests that there are separate modality specific pathways for the meaningful representation of objects and pictures, written material, familiar faces, and colors.

Cognitive psychology often conceptualizes this deficit as an impairment in the object recognition process. Currently visual agnosias are commonly explained in terms of cognitive models of object recognition or identification. The cognitive system for visual object identification is a hierarchal process, broken up into multiple steps of processing.