Thank you for the tag! We spend a lot of time thinking about these questions, so it's exciting whenever someone else asks them! (And they're far from a closed case I think, so I'd never claim to have the last word on the topic.)

Very cool! Do you have an interpretation of *why* the unexpected words were more strongly predicted? Seems counterintuitive and different from stronger post-onset response to expectancy violation.

Final thing: Trying something analogous with blind/blindfolded humans (echolocating an object, then identifying it by *touch*) shows that crossmodal information transfer is very hard and even humanity's finest echolocators struggle with it. But it's possible! Kind of.
doi.org/10.3389/fnin...

But some cool papers suggest that *dolphins* can reliably match a visually learned object to its echo and vice versa. (The key in these and the bat expts is first-presentation recognition, vs. learning an arbitrary visual-echo pairing via repetition.)
doi.org/10.1038/natu...
doi.org/10.1121/1.41...

E.g.: fruit bats can learn to tell objects apart using echolocation & transfer the learning to vision. But 1) visual➡️echo transfer doesn't work, and 2) echo➡️vision learning/transfer suck unless it's totally dark, suggesting reliance on vision rather than integration w/echoes. doi.org/10.1126/scia...

To get at @pedroblack42.bsky.social's question, you can test this by having a bat learn object shapes with vision, echolocation, or both (ie in a dark vs light room, and/or with hard vs foam-covered objects.) Then test the recognition in a non-trained modality.
bsky.app/profile/pedr...

I work with humans, so am kind of a spectator to animal echolocation myself, but it must depend on how you define "generating an image." Are echoes converted to specifically *visual* imagery? Or do they produce an abstracted mental representation that is also accessible to the bat's visual system?

Enjoyed seeing the infancy of EEG expressed in the opening paragraph. "It is now eight years since Berger (1929) first put forward the claim to have led off from the human skull potentials of cerebral origin." 👶

Thanks tweety! Can confirm: He is, and Somebody will.