SKERI Postdoctoral Fellow Awarded Federal Grant for Research on Neural Plasticity and Echolocation

October 3rd, 2025

Smith-Kettlewell postdoctoral fellow Dr. Sofia Krasovskaya has been awarded a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health to advance her work on human echolocation — a method used by some blind people to navigate the world using sound.

Echolocation practitioners produce tongue “clicks” and use the returning echo information to help them perceive and travel through their environment. Dr. Krasovskaya’s project, a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award funded by the NIH’s National Eye Institute, investigates how echolocators gradually build up perception of their surroundings over several clicks. She will use behavioral experiments, electroencephalographic (EEG) brain recordings, and computational models to understand and simulate this process in detail.

The work will build on EEG studies of echolocation previously begun in Dr. Santani Teng’s laboratory, where Dr. Krasovskaya is currently a fellow. The project expands the frontiers of fundamental knowledge about new perceptual mechanisms developed by people adapting to the absence of vision. By studying expert echolocation and the role of experience in reshaping perceptual processing, Dr. Krasovskaya aims to clarify mechanisms of sensory substitution and to inform the design of more effective rehabilitation strategies, training methods, and assistive technologies.