A double dissociation between somatosensory processing for perception and action

Human neuropsychology suggests that there are two distinct body representations. Body image and body schema are, respectively, thought to be involved in conscious perceptual judgments and unconscious sensorimotor guidance. The evidence is based on the double dissociation between disorders of perceptual detection and sensorimotor guidance. Until now, research focused on cases that had impaired tactile pressure sensitivity and comparisons of performance were of cases suffering from different types of lesions (peripheral and central). Here, we report a unique double dissociation in two stroke patients with intact basic somatosensory processing (tactile detection). One patient was poor at identifying the position of where she had been touched on a line drawing of a hand, but was able to point accurately towards the actual position on her/his hand itself. The reverse pattern was observed in the other patient. This finding provides further support for separate processing for body image and body scheme.