Articlei-Perception
Human Echolocation for Target Detection Is More Accurate With Emissions Containing Higher Spectral Frequencies, and This Is Explained by Echo Intensity.
Article in i-Perception. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 18 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Evidence Accumulation in Human Click-Based Echolocation.eNeuro · 2026Article
- Article
- The Occipital Place Area Is Recruited for Echo-Acoustically Guided Navigation in Blind Human Echolocators.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Increased emission intensity can compensate for the presence of noise in human click-based echolocation.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Stimulus uncertainty affects perception in human echolocation: Timing, level, and spectrum.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2020Article
- Article
- The flexible action system: Click-based echolocation may replace certain visual functionality for adaptive walking.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2020Article
- The Echobot: An automated system for stimulus presentation in studies of human echolocation.PloS one · 2019Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans can learn to use acoustic echoes to detect and classify objects. Echolocators typically use tongue clicks to induce these echoes, and there is some evidence that higher spectral frequency content of an echolocator's tongue click is associated with better echolocation performance. This may be explained by the intensity of the echoes. The current study tested experimentally (a) if emissions with higher spectral frequencies lead to better performance for target detection, and (b) if this is mediated by echo intensity. Participants listened to sound recordings that contained an emission and sometimes an echo from an object. The peak spectral frequency of the emission was varied between 3.5 and 4.5 kHz. Participants judged whether they heard the object in these recordings and did the same under conditions in which the intensity of the echoes had been digitally equated. Participants performed better using emissions with higher spectral frequencies, but this advantage was eliminated when the intensity of the echoes was equated. These results demonstrate that emissions with higher spectral frequencies can benefit echolocation performance in conditions where they lead to an increase in echo intensity. The findings suggest that people who train to echolocate should be instructed to make emissions (e.g. mouth clicks) with higher spectral frequency content.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.