9 December 2004
Something in the air
In a learning process rather like that of human infants learning speech, songbirds must hear and memorize a song during their 'sensitive period' if they are to produce a normal song later in life. The nature of this memory or 'template' has remained a mystery. It was assumed that birds must hear the full song in order to reproduce it. Rose et al. now show that a songbird can construct normal songs after having been tutored with pairs of phrases only; they do not need to hear the full song. And birds — white-crowned sparrows in this study — that were tutored with reverse-order phrase pairs went on to produce songs in which the phrase order was reversed. The observations lead to a model that explains how song learning can be achieved given only experience with pairs of phrases; this work will doubtless stimulate the search for populations of phrase-pair neurons that might represent a stored template.
Species-typical songs in white-crowned sparrows
tutored with only phrase pairs
GARY J. ROSE, FRANZ GOLLER, HOWARD J. GRITTON, STEPHANIE
L. PLAMONDON, ALEXANDER T. BAUGH & BRENTON G. COOPER
Nature 432, 753–758 (2004); doi:10.1038/nature02992
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Behavioural biology: Name that tune
DANIEL MARGOLIASH
Understanding how early auditory memories are laid down could help to
explain their role in vocal development. Some ingenious experiments in
birds provide fresh ideas about how such memories are represented.
Nature 432, 682–683 (2004); doi:10.1038/432682a
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