Santani Teng

What is echolocation? Sometimes, the surrounding world is too dark and silent for typical vision and hearing. This is true in deep caves, for example, or in murky water where little light penetrates. Animals living in these environments often have the ability to echolocate: They make sounds and listen for their reflections. Like turning on a flashlight in a dark room, echolocation is a way to illuminate objects and spaces actively using sound.

Sonar for people

Using tongue clicks, cane taps or footfalls, some blind humans have demonstrated an ability to use echolocation (also called sonar, or bi…

The world is rich in sounds and their echoes from reflecting surfaces, making acoustic reverberation a ubiquitous part of everyday life. We usually think of reverberation as a nuisance to overcome (it makes understanding speech or locating sound sources harder), but it also carries useful information, acting as a signature of the space it fills. Reverberation can tell us how big a room is, where we are inside it, and whether there are objects nearby. This has important implications not only for auditory spatial perception in typical individuals, but also in people with sensory loss. Sound…

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When blind persons read braille, a system of raised dots for tactile reading and writing, how is the information processed? How do a few indentations on the fingerpads translate to linguistic information, and how does the text, in turn, influence the motions of the hands reading it? Our work on braille addresses these processes on several levels.