Resumen de L'écholocation humaine chez les handicapés visuels
Echolocation, which is an active mode of perception, is defined as the ability to process acoustic information contained in echoes produced by the reflexion of self-generated sounds on the surrounding obstacles. It is important to note that almost all visually handicapped people spontaneously and intuitively generate sounds such as tongue clicks, snaps, hissings or vocalizations when they move around in order to gather spatial information. Also, this ability can be observed in any person who has had a brief but adequate training period.
This paper describes the research that we have carried out to study obstacle perception through echolocation in blind people. At present, our efforts are mainly aimed to design critical experiments and to complete the ROUSETUS measurement system developed by us � which consists of the obstacle simulator, the ECOTEST and the auditory evoked potential modules � that will allow us to study human echolocation processes and its underlying psychoacoustic mechanisms in cognitive and behavioral contexts.
