Department of Psychology, Durham University.
Department of the Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology.
Psychol Sci. 2022 Jul;33(7):1143-1153. doi: 10.1177/09567976211068070. Epub 2022 Jun 14.
Here, we report novel empirical results from a psychophysical experiment in which we tested the echolocation abilities of nine blind adult human experts in click-based echolocation. We found that they had better acuity in localizing a target and used lower intensity emissions (i.e., mouth clicks) when a target was placed 45° off to the side compared with when it was placed at 0° (straight ahead). We provide a possible explanation of the behavioral result in terms of binaural-intensity signals, which appear to change more rapidly around 45°. The finding that echolocators have better echo-localization off axis is surprising, because for human source localization (i.e., regular spatial hearing), it is well known that performance is best when targets are straight ahead (0°) and decreases as targets move farther to the side. This may suggest that human echolocation and source hearing rely on different acoustic cues and that human spatial hearing has more facets than previously thought.
在这里，我们报告了一项心理物理实验的新实验结果，在该实验中，我们测试了九位基于点击的回声定位的盲人成年专家的回声定位能力。我们发现，与目标位于 0°（正前方）时相比，当目标位于 45°（侧面）时，他们在定位目标时具有更高的敏锐度，并且发出的发射强度（即口部点击）更低。我们根据双耳强度信号对行为结果提供了一种可能的解释，该信号似乎在 45°左右变化更快。回声定位器在轴外具有更好的回声定位能力的发现令人惊讶，因为对于人类声源定位（即常规空间听觉），众所周知，当目标位于正前方（0°）时，性能最佳，并且随着目标向侧面移动而降低。这可能表明，人类回声定位和声源听觉依赖于不同的声学线索，并且人类空间听觉比以前想象的具有更多方面。
