Subject: Re: Is it brain plasticity, or what? From: Peter Meijer <peter.b.l.meijer(at)PHILIPS.COM> Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 15:30:35 +0100Thanks to all who replied privately and on the list with informative comments and references. Ward Drennan wrote > Other than speech and perhaps music for musicians, > I can't imagine anything thing else that would be > so cognitively demanding (Maybe SONAR operation?) Well, one experienced blind user of the Sonicguide sonar device indeed replied after reading the same report that I posted here on the list yesterday, saying > This kind of thing also happens with the Sonicguide. > One day it just seems to somehow meld with you and=20 > when you remove it something is then missing. and another experienced blind Sonicguide user wrote at another occasion > As I said here some time ago, while I was doing some > fairly useful things with the Sonicguide after two > weeks of intensive training, I was still learning > two years later. Sonar devices, which perform sound-to-sound mapping, are not cross-modal like The vOICe's image-to-sound mapping is, while the pitch dimension indicates distance rather than elevation, but one can indeed draw some parallels. Both Sonicguide and The vOICe are information-rich auditory displays targetting use by totally blind people, and I have in the past enjoyed quite a few discussions with the inventor of the Sonicguide, Leslie Kay, about what the respective devices/approaches can and cannot do. One can find a recent paper on the Sonicguide in JASA 107, June 2000, pp. 3266-3275 ("Auditory perception of objects by blind persons, using a bioacoustic high resolution air sonar," by Leslie Kay). Best wishes, Peter Meijer Seeing with Sound - The vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com/voice.htm =