6-hour Training in click-based echolocation changes practice in visual impairment professionals.

Click-based echolocation can support mobility and orientation in people with vision impairments (VI) when used alongside other mobility methods. Only a small number of people with VI use click-based echolocation. Previous research about echolocation addresses the skill of echolocation per se to understand how echolocation works, and its brain basis. Our report is the first to address the question of professional practice for people with VI, i.e., a very different focus. VI professionals are well placed to affect how a person with VI might learn about, experience or use click-based echolocation. Thus, we here investigated if training in click-based echolocation for VI professionals might lead to a change in their professional practice. The training was delivered via 6-h workshops throughout the UK. It was free to attend, and people signed up via a publicly available website. We received follow-up feedback in the form of yes/no answers and free text comments. Yes/no answers showed that 98% of participants had changed their professional practice as a consequence of the training. Free text responses were analysed using content analysis, and we found that 32%, 11.7% and 46.6% of responses indicated a change in information processing, verbal influencing or instruction and practice, respectively. This attests to the potential of VI professionals to act as multipliers of training in click-based echolocation with the potential to improve the lives of people with VI. The training we evaluated here could feasibly be integrated into VI Rehabilitation or VI Habilitation training as implemented at higher education institutions (HEIs) or continuing professional development (CPD).

Human click-based echolocation: Effects of blindness and age, and real-life implications in a 10-week training program.

Understanding the factors that determine if a person can successfully learn a novel sensory skill is essential for understanding how the brain adapts to change, and for providing rehabilitative support for people with sensory loss. We report a training study investigating the effects of blindness and age on the learning of a complex auditory skill: click-based echolocation. Blind and sighted participants of various ages (21-79 yrs; median blind: 45 yrs; median sighted: 26 yrs) trained in 20 sessions over the course of 10 weeks in various practical and virtual navigation tasks. Blind participants also took part in a 3-month follow up survey assessing the effects of the training on their daily life. We found that both sighted and blind people improved considerably on all measures, and in some cases performed comparatively to expert echolocators at the end of training. Somewhat surprisingly, sighted people performed better than those who were blind in some cases, although our analyses suggest that this might be better explained by the younger age (or superior binaural hearing) of the sighted group. Importantly, however, neither age nor blindness was a limiting factor in participants' rate of learning (i.e. their difference in performance from the first to the final session) or in their ability to apply their echolocation skills to novel, untrained tasks. Furthermore, in the follow up survey, all participants who were blind reported improved mobility, and 83% reported better independence and wellbeing. Overall, our results suggest that the ability to learn click-based echolocation is not strongly limited by age or level of vision. This has positive implications for the rehabilitation of people with vision loss or in the early stages of progressive vision loss.

Insoluble Aß overexpression in an App knock-in mouse model alters microstructure and gamma oscillations in the prefrontal cortex, affecting anxiety-related behaviours.

We studied a new amyloid-beta precursor protein (App) knock-in mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AppNL-G-F ), containing the Swedish KM670/671NL mutation, the Iberian I716F mutation and the Artic E693G mutation, which generates elevated levels of amyloid beta (Aß)40 and Aß42 without the confounds associated with APP overexpression. This enabled us to assess changes in anxiety-related and social behaviours, and neural alterations potentially underlying such changes, driven specifically by Aß accumulation. AppNL-G-F knock-in mice exhibited subtle deficits in tasks assessing social olfaction, but not in social motivation tasks. In anxiety-assessing tasks, AppNL-G-F knock-in mice exhibited: (1) increased thigmotaxis in the open field (OF), yet; (2) reduced closed-arm, and increased open-arm, time in the elevated plus maze (EPM). Their ostensibly anxiogenic OF profile, yet ostensibly anxiolytic EPM profile, could hint at altered cortical mechanisms affecting decision-making (e.g. 'disinhibition'), rather than simple core deficits in emotional motivation. Consistent with this possibility, alterations in microstructure, glutamatergic-dependent gamma oscillations and glutamatergic gene expression were all observed in the prefrontal cortex, but not the amygdala, of AppNL-G-F knock-in mice. Thus, insoluble Aß overexpression drives prefrontal cortical alterations, potentially underlying changes in social and anxiety-related behavioural tasks.This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.