An assessment of auditory-guided locomotion in an obstacle circumvention task

Abstract

This study investigated how effectively audition can be used to guide navigation around an obstacle. Ten blindfolded normally sighted participants navigated around a 0.6 × 2 m obstacle while producing self-generated mouth click sounds. Objective movement performance was measured using a Vicon motion capture system. Performance with full vision without generating sound was used as a baseline for comparison. The obstacle’s location was varied randomly from trial to trial: it was either straight ahead or 25 cm to the left or right relative to the participant. Although audition provided sufficient information to detect the obstacle and guide participants around it without collision in the majority of trials, buffer space (clearance between the shoulder and obstacle), overall movement times, and number of velocity corrections were significantly (p < 0.05) greater with auditory guidance than visual guidance. Collisions sometime occurred under auditory guidance, suggesting that audition did not always provide an accurate estimate of the space between the participant and obstacle. Unlike visual guidance, participants did not always walk around the side that afforded the most space during auditory guidance. Mean buffer space was 1.8 times higher under auditory than under visual guidance. Results suggest that sound can be used to generate buffer space when vision is unavailable, allowing navigation around an obstacle without collision in the majority of trials.

Localization of a virtual wall by means of active echolocation by untrained sighted persons

“…These results suggest that it might be possible to use echolocation in a range of distances longer than reported in several previous studies of echolocation with sighted participants in real settings (e.g. 55-65 cm [30], 62-130 cm [31] or less than 1.8 m [7,32]) or in laboratory settings with sighted and blind participants (up to 2 m [9,33]), when using larger obstacles in an otherwise reflection-free environment with low background noise. This was already explored by Schrnich et al [11] by measuring distance discrimination thresholds in echolocation up to 6.8 m using an AVR.…”

Gaze and motor behavior of people with PD during obstacle circumvention

“…Two possible approaches to understanding the similarity between groups in the behavior of OC are i) OC during walking was a challenging task for both groups. OC requires that the individual detects the obstacle's position and edges, performs precise motor actions to move around it, and allows adequate space between the obstacle and the body at the point of moving past it to ensure safe navigation [21]. OC makes walking less automatic and more dependent on cortical control [22], causing a reduction in stability and increasing the risk of falling [11].…”

Strategies for obstacle avoidance during walking in the cat

“…It was reported that during walking humans kept the same distance of approximately one-third of their step length away from both stationary and moving obstructions (Gérin- Lajoie et al 2005). During circumvention of a large obstacle located at the midline, and left or right to the midline of the walkway, the distance between a subject and the obstacle was found to bẽ 0.2 m (Kolarik et al 2016a(Kolarik et al , 2016b. The estimate of bodyscaled distance between a subject and an obstacle during circumvention of a large obstacle appears to develop with age: in children this distance was reported to be 0.4 m, which is twice larger than in adults (Hackney et al 2014).…”