Egyptian fruit bat their days roosting in trees or caves, often with large groups of other bats, sometimes numbering in the thousands. They emerge from the roost to forage for food in the late evening, and return just before dawn. They hang upside down, with their wings folded closely around their bodies. Egyptian fruit bats, along with other species in the genus "Rousettus", are the only megachiropterid bats to use echolocation, which they accomplish by emitting a series of sharp clicks with their tongues. The clicks are normally slow and constant, but these clicks speed up dramatically when the bats approach an object.
Human echolocation later participated in experiments in facial vision (White, et al. 1970). About 1998, he visited the Auditory Neuroethology Laboratory at the University of Maryland and was interviewed about his experience with facial vision. The researchers in the lab study bat echolocation and were aware of the "Wiederorientierung" phenomenon described by Griffin (1959), where bats, despite continuing to emit echolocation calls, use path integration in familiar acoustic space. Scadden indicated that he found echolocation required extra effort, and would not use it to navigate in familiar areas unless he was alert for obstacles, thus providing insight into the bat behavior. The