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Santani Teng
M.A., Psychology University of California, Davis
B.A., Psychology, University of California, Davis
Participate in our studies! Visit Teng Lab Experiment Participation for details.
Hello! I'm an Associate Scientist at Smith-Kettlewell, where I investigate auditory spatial perception, haptics, echolocation, and assisted mobility in sighted and blind persons. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and postdoctoral work at MIT, where I remain affiliated.
(H/h)
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Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center
The Center's research goal is to develop and apply new scientific knowledge and practical, cost-effective devices to better understand and address the real-world problems of blind, visually impaired, and deaf-blind consumers
Teng Lab
We aim to better understand how people perceive, interact with, and move through the world, especially when vision is unavailable. To this end, the lab studies perception and sensory processing in multiple sensory modalities, with particular interests in echolocation and braille reading in blind persons. We are also interested in mobility and navigation, including assistive technology using nonvisual cues. These are wide-ranging topics, which we approach using a combination of psychophysical, neurophysiological, engineering, and computational tools.
Brabyn Lab
Together we address problems of blindness and visual impairment, particularly problems faced by our target populaiton that may be amenable to technological solutions.

Teng Lab Experiment Participation
Available experiments in the Cognition, Action, and Neural Dynamics Lab
Hearing the World: A Remote Study of Auditory Perception
We aim to investigate the nature of auditory perception and how the brain learns rules for interpreting sounds.
Haptic Kinematics of Two-Handed Braille Reading in Blind Adults
This page (currently under construction) accompanies a work-in-progress poster at the 2020 Eurohaptics meeting.
Human Echolocation
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...

Reverberant Auditory Scene Analysis
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...

Optimizing Echoacoustics: An online perceptual study (Under construction)
An online study of echoacoustic perception

The Kinematics of Braille Reading
[Under construction]
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...