Impairment in localization of body parts following brain damage

A patient is described who was unable, on various conditions and modalities, to localize body parts. Her difficulty could not be accounted for by other neuropsychological disturbances and seemed to be body specific, since she had no trouble at localizing single parts of objects. The pattern of her errors suggests that her disturbance involved the conceptual representation of individual body parts. This case supports the hypothesis that knowledge of one's own body is stored at some level, independently of other kinds of knowledge; it also appears to be organized as a set of concepts representing single body parts, where functionally similar parts are closely related to each other irrespective of their actual distance on the body.