Blindness and low vision are prevalent conditions, including almost 2 million people in the UK, for whom hearing plays a fundamental role in navigating the environment and supporting independent daily activities. Blindness provides a unique model of how vision shapes hearing, and how the brain adapts to significant changes in environmental conditions. There has been a recent surge of interest in human echolocation abilities, which involve blind individuals producing sound emissions and using the returning echoes to provide them with information about objects in their surroundings, in a similar manner to bats navigating in the dark. Electronic sensory substitution device (SSD) travel aids have also been developed, that provide information to blind people about their surroundings using sound or touch. While work has shown that blind people can develop enhanced hearing abilities compared to sighted people, how these abilities can be utilized in daily life has yet to be fully explored.
Using methods including 3-D motion capture, the project will explore the practicality and effectiveness of using echolocation and SSDs for blind people to detect and safely navigate around single or multiple obstacles, which are either stationary or moving. Hearing abilities will be tested in quiet, reverberant, and noisy conditions that would be encountered in everyday life, either in isolation or also using a white cane or guide dog. The findings will provide insights regarding how auditory abilities can become enhanced following visual loss that will inform scientific theory, and provide patient benefits to blind people to use sound to explore new environments.
For more information on the supervisor for this project, please visit the UEA website www.uea.ac.uk
The start date is 1 October 2022
Entry Requirements: Acceptable first degree 2:1 in Psychology or cognate subject. Research Methods Masters in Psychology, or equivalent qualification.
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