How Echolocation Substitutes For Eyes In Vision Impaired People
Monday, December 29, 2014 - 18:20
in Psychology & Sociology
According to some papers, human echolocation is another "sense," working in tandem with hearing and touch to deliver information to people with visual impairment. A new paper adds evidence for the vision-like qualities of echolocation in blind echolocators - by wrongly judging how heavy objects of different sizes felt. The experiment, conducted by psychologist Gavin Buckingham of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland and colleagues at the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Canada, demonstrated that echolocators experience a "size-weight illusion" when they use their echolocation to get a sense of how big objects are, in just the same way as sighted people do when using their normal vision. read more