I've found a lot of those articles to be a bit like the psi experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. They generally begin from a place of treating the echolocator's claims as credulous or they seriously underestimate the ability of blind people to derive signals from many different cues.
I'd really like to see some double blinded studies comparing the success of echolocators in every day tasks against non-echolocators.
>I'd really like to see some double blinded studies comparing the success of echolocators in every day tasks against non-echolocators.
I'm trying to think of how you could set up that study. There's a lot of factors you'd have to control for. You'd need to set up some kind of baseline to work off of. Which I feel like could be difficult with something like compensating for a disability.
There's the length of time being blind to consider. Someone who's been blind longer likely has better abilities at finding their way around and finding things whatever methods they use. Then as another poster mentioned, there's controlling for echolators using different methods along with echolocation. Then there's sample size. To get an actual unbiased set of data work with you would need more than a handful of people. You'd need a fairly large group of disparate people in each category you're testing for to get any kind of statistically significant result.
There's lots more to consider, these are just a few that came to mind off the to of my head. It would be a cool study to see done though.
Minor nit: I'm not sure how one would double-blind an echolocation study.
I think one useful distinction we can draw from your point is that there's a difference between (1) establishing that human echolocation exists and (2) establishing that human echolocation is a useful skill for persons with visual impairment in their daily lives.
Regarding (1): Skimming the literature, human echolocation seems like a very robust lab phenomenon. I think it's safe to say we've established beyond a reasonable doubt the laboratory-fact of human echolocation in the general population using traditional psychometric research techniques. (I am not an expert, but the research linked from the target article has a pretty robust citation network in very good journals using a broad spectrum of lab techniques, google scholar turns up some review articles on the phenomenon in respected journals, etc.).
Regarding (2): After a very cursory search I don't see much out there. It's both messy and expensive to establish the success of coaching/skill acquisition (like training in echolocation) in the long-term wellness of individuals. There must be a robust literature on evaluating outcomes for learned skills (it's relevant to everything from evaluating skills for managing memory impairment to evaluating training programs for anger management skills to such pure horseshit as empathy training for corporate execs).
What criteria would you suggest for a successful experiment in (2)? Is there something you'd like to lean on as a precedent?
Also note that the target research article isn't interested in either (1) or (2). It takes (1) for granted and uses it to suggest a model of neural modularity that is task-oriented rather than modality oriented, but we're far enough down the comment thread that whatever.
Where did you look? The keywords echolocation and blind returns hundreds of relevant articles in google scholar. Many of them from serious journals.