Anchoring the “floating arm”: Use of proprioceptive and mirror visual feedback from one arm to control involuntary displacement of the other arm

- Recent studies have cast doubt on the mirror paradigm's benefit on motor behavior.
- Muscular feedback from the arm in the mirror is often confounded with mirror feedback.
- Masking muscular feedback of one arm largely reduces interlimb coupling.
- Interlimb coupling through mirror feedback was weaker than interlimb coupling through muscular feedback.

Arm movement control takes advantage of multiple inputs, including those originating from the contralateral arm. In the mirror paradigm, it has been suggested that control of the unseen arm, hidden by the mirror, is facilitated by the reflection of the other, moving arm. Although proprioceptive feedback originating from the moving arm, (the image of which is reflected in the mirror), is always coupled with visual feedback in the mirror paradigm, the former has received little attention. We recently showed that the involuntary arm movement following a sustained, isometric contraction, known as the “floating arm” or “Kohnstamm phenomenon”, was adjusted to the passive-motorized displacement of the other arm. However, provision of mirror feedback, that is, the reflection in the mirror of the passively moved arm, did not add to this coupling effect. Therefore, the interlimb coupling in the mirror paradigm may to a large extent have a proprioceptive origin rather than a visual origin. The objective of the present study was to decouple mirror feedback and proprioceptive feedback from the reflected, moving arm and evaluate their respective contributions to interlimb coupling in the mirror paradigm. First (in Experiment 1, under eyes-closed conditions), we found that masking the proprioceptive afferents of the passively moved arm (by co-vibrating the antagonistic biceps and triceps muscles) suppressed the interlimb coupling between involuntary displacement of one arm and passive displacement of the other. Next (in Experiment 2), we masked proprioceptive afferents of the passively moved arm and specifically evaluated mirror feedback. We found that interlimb coupling through mirror feedback (though significant) was weaker than interlimb coupling through proprioceptive feedback. Overall, the present results show that in the mirror paradigm, proprioceptive feedback is stronger and more consistent than visual-mirror feedback in terms of the impact on interlimb coupling.