From: New York Magazine
How Blind People Use Echolocation to Get Around
January 14, 2015
New York Magazine:
Echolocation — sending out a sound wave, hearing how it bounces back at you, and using that information to navigate your environment — is a technique generally associated with animals like bats and dolphins, not people. And yet some visually impaired folks learn to use finger snaps or tongue clicks to help them get around.
In a study published in Psychological Science, a team led by Gavin Buckingham of Heriot-Watt University in Scotland tried to learn about how this skill works. To do so, they used a well-known quirk of human perception called the size-weight illusion: If you ask someone to pick up two objects of the same weight but different sizes, the smaller one will feel heavier.
Read the whole story: New York Magazine
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