Overview
- Smith–Kettlewell researchers report in an eNeuro paper published Monday that spatial maps form in echolocation by accumulating evidence across successive click–echo pairs.
- The team presented synthesized mouth clicks and echoes in darkness in trains of 2 to 11 sounds and asked listeners to judge whether a hidden target was on the right or left.
- Four blind expert echolocators outperformed 21 sighted novices on the left–right task, reflecting experience with using clicks to sense objects.
- For experts, accuracy rose as the number of clicks increased, with one standout participant needing only two clicks to call the direction.
- EEG decoding detected echo laterality from the first click, with responses that strengthened across the sequence and tracked behavior, suggesting trainable strategies despite a small expert sample.