Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people could learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training. For more recent work in the journal Cerebral Cortex, she and her colleagues examined the brain changes underlying these abilities. After training, both blind and sighted people displayed responses to echoes in their visual cortex, a finding that challenges the belief that primary sensory regions are wholly sense-specific.

The researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 blind people for between two and three hours twice a week over 10 weeks. They started by teaching participants to produce mouth clicks, then trained them on three tasks. The first two involved judging the size or orientation of objects. The third involved navigating virtual mazes, which participants moved through with the help of simulated click-plus-echo sounds tied to their positions.

Both groups improved on all the tasks.