A dopaminergic mesocortical circuit in juvenile zebra finches detects the presence of an adult zebra finch tutor and helps to encode the performance of the tutor, facilitating the cultural transmission of vocal behaviour.

Efficiently imitating a complex motor sequence such as birdsong is a computationally intensive problem. Here the authors show that young zebra finches learn new songs using a non-optimal strategy that prioritizes efficient learning of syllable vocabulary over syllable sequence.

Although vocal learning is widely speculated to depend on motor to auditory (i.e., forward) pathways, the neurons that convey forward signals important to vocal learning remain unknown. Here the authors identify neurons that transmit signals from songbird motor to auditory regions and demonstrate their role in vocal learning.

Sleep rearranges the firing patterns of excitatory projection neurons in zebra finch songbirds. Patterned inhibition is implicated in maintaining stable songs in spite of the instability in the projection neuron population.