Visual manifestation of body schema abnormalities in a case of alien hand syndrome

Davies (1973) found that afterimages of one!s own limbs fade if the limb is moved away from the location at which the afterimage was formed, perhaps due to a conflict between visual and proprioceptive input. In Carlson et. al. (ECVP 2008), we found that this effect could be extended to grasped objects. LD!s, normal (right) hand replicates the previous findings—movement of her hand and/or objects in its grasp caused their afterimages to fade. Objects moved via a manually-operated mechanical device did not cause fading. In contrast, movement of her alien (left) hand and a grasped object led to fading of the hand!s afterimage, while the object!s afterimage persisted.