The occipital place area is recruited for echo-acoustically guided navigation in blind human echolocators

In the investigation of the brain areas involved in human spatial navigation, the traditional focus has been on visually guided navigation in sighted people. Consequently, it is unclear whether involved areas also support navigational abilities in other modalities. We explored this possibility by testing whether the occipital place area (OPA) – a region associated with visual boundary-based navigation in sighted people – has a similar role in echo-acoustically guided navigation in blind human echolocators. We used fMRI to measure brain activity in six blind echolocation experts (EEs; 5 males, 1 female), twelve blind controls (BCs; 6 males, 6 females), and fourteen sighted controls (SCs; 8 males, 6 females) as they listened to pre-recorded echolocation sounds that conveyed either a route taken through one of three maze environments, a scrambled (i.e. spatiotemporally incoherent) control sound, or a no-echo control sound. We found significantly greater activity in the OPA of EEs, but not the control groups, when they listened to the coherent route sounds relative to the scrambled sounds. This provides evidence that the OPA of the human navigation brain network is not strictly tied to the visual modality but can be recruited for non-visual navigation. We also found that EEs, but not BCs or SCs, recruited early visual cortex for processing of echo-acoustic information. This is consistent with the recent notion that the human brain is organised flexibly by task rather than by specific modalities. Significance statement: There has been much research on the brain areas involved in visually guided navigation, but we do not know whether the same or different brain regions are involved when blind people use a sense other than vision to navigate. In this study, we show that one part of the brain (occipital place area) known to play a specific role in visually guided navigation is also active in blind human echolocators when they use reflected sound to navigate their environment. This finding opens up new ways of understanding how people navigate, and informs our ability to provide rehabilitative support to people with vision loss.