Human Echolocation Works Step by Step
hubie writes:
A study reveals how individual tongue clicks and their echoes contribute to object sensing:
Navigating the world as a blind person sometimes involves using a cane, guide dog or wearable GPS system. For some, this toolkit includes echolocation. Producing tongue clicks and listening for echoes can be enough to gain information about nearby objects.
But even for expert echolocators, a single click is rarely enough to perceive an object. Echo after echo incrementally improves understanding, especially for expert echolocators, researchers report April 6 in eNeuro. The finding helps explain how the brain processes sound more generally.
[...] Many studies have shown that echolocation recruits visual areas of the brain and that performance improves significantly with practice. "What remained unexamined here was how this happens, how the information builds in real time, over individual echo signals," says cognitive neuroscientist Santani Teng at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco.
[...] In line with previous research, expert echolocators were far better at determining the direction of an object than people who could see. One exceptional echolocator needed only to hear two sets of clicks and echoes to determine an object's direction. Unlike in previous studies, the team used the brain wave data to show that each click-echo pair added to the evidence the brain was accumulating to make the perceptual decision.
"The study suggests that in human echolocation, spatial representations are constructed by progressively accumulating acoustic evidence over time, rather than through a single 'optimal snapshot,' " says neuroscientist Monica Gori at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa and the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition in Florida, who was not involved in the study.
[...] "Echolocators have a truly remarkable skill, with real-life benefits, but it is not magic," Teng says.
Journal Reference: Haydee G Garcia-Lazaro and Santani Teng eNeuro 6 April 2026, ENEURO.0342-25.2026; https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0342-25.2026
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