Anglia Ruskin University

Blind listeners have been reported to display supra-normal performance for many auditory tasks, including sound localization, pitch discrimination, motion discrimination and echolocation (see Voss et al., 2010, for a review).

Compensatory auditory mechanisms develop following visual deprivation, that extend to the spatial domain and beyond. Occipital regions are recruited to process auditory signals (the brain is not 'hardwired'). This may enhance auditory spatial performance.

Despite the importance of accurate judgments of distance to sound sources for visually impaired listeners, very little is currently known regarding auditory distance perception among the blind.

How accurate is auditory distance estimation among blind listeners?

Does accuracy depend on the environment and which auditory distance cues are available, or what the stimulus is?

There is evidence that for relative distance tasks, blind listeners display better performance than sighted listeners (Voss et al., 2004) in both anechoic and reverberant virtual environments (Kolarik et al., 2013). However, absolute judgments of distance to single, static sources necessitate a topographic representation of the auditory world without any reference or comparison sound sources.