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Birdsong is a communicative process between birds associated with courtship and mating. Birdsong is considered to be distinct from bird calls, which are shorter than birdsong and attributed with alarms or maintaining contact with a flock.
Learning song from two ‘tutors’ at different points in development permanently alters neural activity in auditory processing and learning regions in zebra finches.
Increased movement is associated with improved vocal activity in young zebra finches, while reducing locomotion leads to poor vocal learning. These results suggest that exercise in juvenile birds may actually promote their ability to learn and produce songs.
In male zebra finches, song practice and courtship song performance are associated with distinct patterns of neural activity in the basal ganglia, resulting in reduced vocal variability during performance.
Wan-Chun Liu et al. demonstrate that the sensory phase of vocal learning in zebra finches is split across two stages: (1) passive listening and formation of a memory, and (2) active listening and behavioral engagement of juveniles with adult tutors. Furthermore, they show that approach behavior is correlated with song imitation quality, and immediate early gene expression in the caudal medial nidopallium linked to auditory behavior.
Thalamic activity onto a sparse population of premotor neurons in the zebra finch song nucleus initiates syllable onset, enabling the orchestration of song production.
The activity of a subset of projections neurons in the song premotor nucleus HVC of canaries depends on preceding steps in the bird’s song and can predict future song phrases.
A new study shows that the transient manipulation of neural activity can sometimes have 'off-target' effects, making it challenging to determine the specific neural circuit that generates a particular behaviour.
