“Echolocation in Rats”, Donald A. Riley, Mark R. Rosenzweig1957 (animal psych)⁠:

Do rats use the echoes of sounds they produce lo localize objects? In a preliminary report (8) we presented evidence that blinded rats can localize and avoid barriers in this way. Several tests indicated that the performance was based on auditory cues. For example, occluding the animals’ ears by taping clown the pinnas impaired discrimination of the position of the barriers. It was tempting to believe that the auditory, cues might be echoes of the ultrasonic cries that the rat has been shown to make (1). However, monitoring the performance with a condenser microphone showed that the ultrasonic cries were given very rarely in the maze, and the cries did not seem to be related to the discrimination. The sum of the evidence suggested that rats, like human beings, can use the echoes of incidental, nonvocal sounds they produce to detect objects in their environment.

…On a 2-choice elevated maze, blinded female rats:

learned to detect from the choice point, a barrier which blocks a path to the goal and to avoid that path, but when hearing was impaired, their performance dropped almost to chance.

This and other tests supported the conclusion that “the ability of rats to echolocate may be the basis of some performances which have been attributed to visual discrimination.”

See Also:

• Mouth-clicks used by blind expert human echolocators—signal description and model based signal synthesis

• How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation

• Echolocating bats rely on an innate speed-of-sound reference

• Socio-spatial cognition in cats: Mentally mapping owner’s location from voice

• The hearing aid dilemma: amplification, compression, and distortion of the neural code

• Bone conduction facilitates self-other voice discrimination