Human click-based echolocation: Effects of blindness and age, and real-life implications in a 10-week training program
Fig 1
An illustration of the general procedure for data collection for a single participant.
Note that tasks were done in different orders across participants and sessions, and this flowchart is just for illustration. In each of the 20 training sessions, each participant performed four separate tasks—size discrimination, orientation perception, virtual maze navigation, and real indoor/outdoor navigation. Please see the main text for descriptions of each of the tasks. For practical reasons, the natural navigation task was always done either in the beginning or the end of a session (in approximately equal parts). The other, lab-based, tasks were run in different orders across participants, with participants being able to choose the order if they wished. An additional session was used to acquire basic measurements of participants’ hearing (audiometry and DFM/DCI hearing tests)–please see the main text for details. Note that for some participants these were acquired before training began, rather than after (as indicated in the figure). For blind participants, they were contacted 3 months following training completion to complete a survey.