Human echolocation: waveform analysis of tongue clicks

Abstract

Publisher's copyright statement:This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in Electronics Letters and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at IET Digital Library. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Some blind individuals have the ability to detect and classify objects in complex scenes by using echolocation based on "tongue clicks". In this paper, we present a waveform analysis of the tongue clicks collected from three blind individuals who use tongue-click based echolocation on a daily basis. It is found that the tongue clicks are wideband signals and that that the spectrum of clicks varies within and between individuals. However, by using the wideband ambiguity function, we find that all of the clicks from three different individuals share some common characteristics.

Human Echolocation for Target Detection Is More Accurate With Emissions Containing Higher Spectral Frequencies, and This Is Explained by Echo Intensity

“…It is important to address whether the results of the present study can be generalised to the use of echolocation in a more ecologically valid setting. Importantly, we used emissions with peak frequencies between 3.5 and 4.5 kHz – a range that includes frequencies contained in natural human mouth clicks of expert echolocators ( Thaler et al., 2017 ; Zhang et al., 2017 ). Furthermore, the click emissions we used were similar to those that people make ( Thaler et al., 2017 ; Zhang et al., 2017 .…”

“…Since the early studies on echolocation, there has been considerable progress in our understanding of the acoustic properties of tongue clicks common among expert echolocators. Mouth clicks of expert echolocators, for example, typically last 3 ms and contain energy at multiple parts of the audible spectrum, with peaks between 2 and 5 kHz and an additional local peak at 10 kHz (de Vos & Hornikx, 2017; Thaler et al., 2017 ; Zhang et al., 2017 ). There is also individual variability across echolocators in terms of peak spectral frequency and click duration.…”

Bayes-Like Integration of a New Sensory Skill with Vision

“…This further tested the first criterion. This manipulation was inspired by the finding that actual echolocation users have some meaningful variation in exactly what frequencies they emit from click to click 41 .…”

Bayes-Like Integration of a New Sensory Skill with Vision

“…This further tested the first criterion. This manipulation was inspired by the finding that actual echolocation users have some meaningful variation in exactly what frequencies they emit from click to click (Zhang et al, 2017).…”