Department of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom.
Sci Rep. 2017 Oct 12;7(1):13069. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-12967-3.
Echolocation is the ability to use sound-echoes to infer spatial information about the environment. People can echolocate for example by making mouth clicks. Previous research suggests that echolocation in blind people activates brain areas that process light in sighted people. Research has also shown that echolocation in blind people may replace vision for calibration of external space. In the current study we investigated if echolocation may also draw on 'visual' resources in the sighted brain. To this end, we paired a sensory interference paradigm with an echolocation task. We found that exposure to an uninformative visual stimulus (i.e. white light) while simultaneously echolocating significantly reduced participants' ability to accurately judge object size. In contrast, a tactile stimulus (i.e. vibration on the skin) did not lead to a significant change in performance (neither in sighted, nor blind echo expert participants). Furthermore, we found that the same visual stimulus did not affect performance in auditory control tasks that required detection of changes in sound intensity, sound frequency or sound location. The results suggest that processing of visual and echo-acoustic information draw on common neural resources.
回声定位是指利用声音回波推断环境空间信息的能力。例如，人们可以通过发出口腔咔哒声来进行回声定位。先前的研究表明，盲人的回声定位会激活在视力正常的人眼中处理光线的大脑区域。研究还表明，盲人的回声定位可能会替代视觉来校准外部空间。在当前的研究中，我们调查了回声定位是否也可以利用视力正常的人大脑中的“视觉”资源。为此，我们将一种感觉干扰范式与回声定位任务相结合。我们发现，在同时进行回声定位时，暴露于无信息的视觉刺激（即白光）会显著降低参与者准确判断物体大小的能力。相比之下，触觉刺激（即皮肤上的振动）不会导致表现出现显著变化（无论是在视力正常的参与者还是盲人回声专家参与者中）。此外，我们发现，相同的视觉刺激不会影响需要检测声音强度、频率或位置变化的听觉控制任务的表现。结果表明，视觉和回声声信息的处理依赖于共同的神经资源。
