Sensorimotor dynamics of target acquisition and homing in human echolocation

Abstract

Abstract

ABSTRACT Blindness imposes constraints on the acquisition of environmental sensory information. To mitigate those constraints, some blind people employ active echolocation , a technique in which self-generated tongue “clicks” produce informative reflections from surrounding surfaces. Practitioners typically produce multiple clicks that guide, and are in turn shaped by, goal-relevant action. What perceptual information is gained in the echoacoustic signal from each click, and how does it inform motor behavior during task performance? To explore these poorly understood dynamics, here we recorded head movements and clicking behavior of an early-blind expert echolocation practitioner who localized and oriented toward a target object positioned at a 1 m distance and random azimuth in the frontal hemifield. Three additional participants, including a blind self-reported echolocator, were unable to perform the task better than chance level. Performance clearly benefited from available echoacoustic information: The larger target was localized with an average absolute angular error of 9.5° in 9.3 s, vs. 24.6° in 23.2 s for the smaller target. In a passive control condition prohibiting clicks altogether, no significant convergence on the target was observed, confirming the necessity of active sampling. Clicks were emitted somewhat more rapidly and intensely for small targets, but within-trial emission rate and head kinematics (left-to-right reversals) remained relatively invariant. Angular convergence toward the target was consistent with an exponential decay profile, though only weakly distinguishable from a linear trend for small targets. Pooled across trials within each condition, clicks were unimodally distributed about the target azimuth, suggesting an intensity-maximization strategy. In sum, clicking behavior and target size (therefore sonar strength) strongly influenced the rate and precision of orientation convergence toward the target, suggesting that dynamic interactions between motor-driven head movements, click production, and the resulting echoacoustic feedback accumulate goal-relevant evidence across multiple samples. Together, these results illustrate naturalistic sensorimotor dependencies underlying auditory active sensing in the absence of vision.