{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"institution":[{"name":"bioRxiv"}],"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,30]],"date-time":"2026-07-30T11:37:57Z","timestamp":1785411477725,"version":"3.56.0"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,16]]},"group-title":"Neuroscience","reference-count":50,"publisher":"openRxiv","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,16]],"date-time":"2026-06-16T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1781568000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Foundation for Ophthalmology Research and Education International"},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000002","name":"National Institutes of Health","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["5T32EY025201-03"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["5T32EY025201-03"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000002","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/100000002","name":"National Institutes of Health","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","award":["1R21EY032282-01"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["1R21EY032282-01"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100000002","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"crossref"}]},{"award":["90RE5024-01-00"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["90RE5024-01-00"]}],"id":[{"id":"https:\/\/ror.org\/05r5c7c30","id-type":"ROR","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,15]]},"abstract":"<jats:title>ABSTRACT<\/jats:title>\n                <jats:p>\n                  Blindness imposes constraints on the acquisition of environmental sensory information. To mitigate those constraints, some blind people employ\n                  <jats:italic>active echolocation<\/jats:italic>\n                  , a technique in which self-generated tongue \u201cclicks\u201d produce informative reflections from surrounding surfaces. Practitioners typically produce multiple clicks that guide, and are in turn shaped by, goal-relevant action. What perceptual information is gained in the echoacoustic signal from each click, and how does it inform motor behavior during task performance? To explore these poorly understood dynamics, here we recorded head movements and clicking behavior of an early-blind expert echolocation practitioner who localized and oriented toward a target object positioned at a 1 m distance and random azimuth in the frontal hemifield. Three additional participants, including a blind self-reported echolocator, were unable to perform the task better than chance level. Performance clearly benefited from available echoacoustic information: The larger target was localized with an average absolute angular error of 9.5\u00b0 in 9.3 s, vs. 24.6\u00b0 in 23.2 s for the smaller target. In a passive control condition prohibiting clicks altogether, no significant convergence on the target was observed, confirming the necessity of active sampling. Clicks were emitted somewhat more rapidly and intensely for small targets, but within-trial emission rate and head kinematics (left-to-right reversals) remained relatively invariant. Angular convergence toward the target was consistent with an exponential decay profile, though only weakly distinguishable from a linear trend for small targets. Pooled across trials within each condition, clicks were unimodally distributed about the target azimuth, suggesting an intensity-maximization strategy. In sum, clicking behavior and target size (therefore sonar strength) strongly influenced the rate and precision of orientation convergence toward the target, suggesting that dynamic interactions between motor-driven head movements, click production, and the resulting echoacoustic feedback accumulate goal-relevant evidence across multiple samples. Together, these results illustrate naturalistic sensorimotor dependencies underlying auditory active sensing in the absence of vision.\n                <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.64898\/2026.06.13.732093","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,6,16]],"date-time":"2026-06-16T08:40:15Z","timestamp":1781599215000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Sensorimotor dynamics of target acquisition and homing in human echolocation"],"prefix":"10.64898","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-2554-2290","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Santani","family":"Teng","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, CA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-9437-6954","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Giovanni","family":"Fusco","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, CA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Aarshil","family":"Patel","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, CA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"54368","reference":[{"issue":"1","key":"2026061719200513000_2026.06.13.732093v1.1","first-page":"32","article-title":"A New Method for Non-parametric Multivariate Analysis of Variance: NON-PARAMETRIC MANOVA FOR ECOLOGY","volume":"26","year":"2001","journal-title":"Austral Ecology"},{"key":"2026061719200513000_2026.06.13.732093v1.2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.neuropsychologia.2013.01.024"},{"key":"2026061719200513000_2026.06.13.732093v1.3","unstructured":"Bradski, Gary , and Adrian Kaehler . 2000. \u201cOpenCV.\u201d Dr. Dobb\u2019s Journal of Software Tools for the Professional Programmer 3 (2)."},{"key":"2026061719200513000_2026.06.13.732093v1.4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bujacz, Michal , Krzysztof Matysik , and Grzegorz Gorski . 2022. \u201cA Mobile Application for Training Echolocation with a Novel Method for Spatially Rendered Echoes.\u201d 2022 IEEE 1st International Conference on Internet of Digital Reality (IoD), June 23, 000045\u2013000048.","DOI":"10.1109\/IoD55468.2022.9987159"},{"key":"2026061719200513000_2026.06.13.732093v1.5","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1167\/8.6.20"},{"key":"2026061719200513000_2026.06.13.732093v1.6","unstructured":"Burnham, Kenneth P. , and David R. Anderson . 2002. Model Selection and Multimodel Inference: A Practical Information-Theoretic Approach. 2nd ed. Kenneth P. Burnham and David R. Anderson . Springer. 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