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Ultrafine spatial acuity of blind expert human echolocators

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Abstract

Echolocating organisms represent their external environment using reflected auditory information from emitted vocalizations. This ability, long known in various non-human species, has also been documented in some blind humans as an aid to navigation, as well as object detection and coarse localization. Surprisingly, our understanding of the basic acuity attainable by practitioners—the most fundamental underpinning of echoic spatial perception—remains crude. We found that experts were able to discriminate horizontal offsets of stimuli as small as ~1.2° auditory angle in the frontomedial plane, a resolution approaching the maximum measured precision of human spatial hearing and comparable to that found in bats performing similar tasks. Furthermore, we found a strong correlation between echolocation acuity and age of blindness onset. This first measure of functional spatial resolution in a population of expert echolocators demonstrates precision comparable to that found in the visual periphery of sighted individuals.

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Acknowledgments

We thank all participants for their cooperation and World Access for the Blind for facilitating communication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of California at Berkeley, 3210 Tolman Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Santani Teng & David Whitney

  2. Department of Psychology, Hendrix College, Conway, AR, USA

    Amrita Puri

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  1. Santani Teng
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  2. Amrita Puri
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  3. David Whitney
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Correspondence to Santani Teng.

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Teng, S., Puri, A. & Whitney, D. Ultrafine spatial acuity of blind expert human echolocators. Exp Brain Res 216, 483–488 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2951-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-011-2951-1

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