Journal article
Increased emission intensity can compensate for the presence of noise in human click-based echolocation
- Abstract:
- Echolocating bats adapt their emissions to succeed in noisy environments. In the present study we investigated if echolocating humans can detect a sound-reflecting surface in the presence of noise and if intensity of echolocation emissions (i.e. clicks) changes in a systematic pattern. We tested people who were blind and had experience in echolocation, as well as blind and sighted people who had no experience in echolocation prior to the study. We used an echo-detection paradigm where participants listened to binaural recordings of echolocation sounds (i.e. they did not make their own click emissions), and where intensity of emissions and echoes changed adaptively based on participant performance (intensity of echoes was yoked to intensity of emissions). We found that emission intensity had to systematically increase to compensate for weaker echoes relative to background noise. In fact, emission intensity increased so that spectral power of echoes exceeded spectral power of noise by 12 dB in 4-kHz and 5-kHz frequency bands. The effects were the same across all participant groups, suggesting that this effect occurs independently of long-time experience with echolocation. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that people can echolocate in the presence of noise and suggest that one potential strategy to deal with noise is to increase emission intensity to maintain signal-to-noise ratio of certain spectral components of the echoes.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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Access Document
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41598-021-81220-9
- Publication website:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81220-9
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Research
- Journal:
- Scientific Reports More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 1750
- Publication date:
- 2021-01-18
- Acceptance date:
- 2021-01-04
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2045-2322
- ISSN:
-
2045-2322
- Pmid:
-
33462283
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1158843
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1158843
- Deposit date:
-
2021-02-05
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- J. G. Castillo-Serrano et al
- Copyright date:
- 2021
- Rights statement:
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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