Science Alert June 20, 2022
Researchers in the UK conducted a training study investigating the effects of blindness and age on the learning of a click-based echolocation. Blind and sighted participants of various ages trained in 20 sessions over the course of 10 weeks in various practical and virtual navigation tasks. They found that both sighted and blind people improved considerably on all measures, and in some cases performed comparatively to expert echolocators at the end of training. Sighted people performed better than those who were blind in some cases. However, neither age nor blindness was a limiting factor in participants’ rate of learning or in their ability to apply their echolocation skills to novel, untrained tasks. Blind participants reported improved mobility, and 83% reported better independence and wellbeing. According to the researchers their results suggest that the ability to learn click-based echolocation is not strongly limited by age or level of vision…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Proportion of correct answers across sessions in the control training task. Credit: PLOS, June 2, 21.