Investigate echolocation with non-disabled individuals

Vision is the most important sense on the domain of spatial perception. Congenital blind individuals, that cannot rely on vision, show impairments in performing complex spatial auditory tasks. The echolocation technique allows blind people to compensate the audio spatial deficit. Here, we present an overview of our works. First, we show that also sighted people can acquire spatial information through echolocation, i.e., localize an aperture or discriminate the depths of an object locate in front of them. Second, we identified some kinematic variables that can predict the echolocation performance. Third, we show that echolocation, not only helps to understand the external space, but can influence internal models of the body-space relation, such as the peripersonal space (PPS). We discuss all these aspects showing that human beings are sensitive to echoes. Spatial information can be acquired by echolocation when vision is not available also in people that normally would acquire the same information through ...