Topic: birdsong

Song learning requires birds to interpret sensory evidence, assign credit to changes in behaviour, and reproduce remembered vocal targets. This lecture compares auditory-feedback adaptation, reinforcement learning and imitation as parts of a possible common learning architecture. Incomplete compensation for pitch-shifted feedback is examined through Bayesian causal inference: internal pitch predictions are combined with auditory evidence while feedback unlikely to be self-generated is discounted. Nonlinear pitch trajectories during conditioning motivate an extension of classical policy-gradie

Hans Slabbekoorn examines animal acoustic communication, from birdsong to low-frequency whale calls. Songs and other signals support courtship and conflict, while the acoustic properties of habitats shape their evolution. Expanding human noise in terrestrial and aquatic environments is changing the conditions under which these signals function. The lecture considers this acoustic environmental change and the attention needed to preserve animal communication, alongside implications for human physical and mental health.

Performing learned behaviors requires animals to produce precisely timed motor sequences. The underlying neuronal circuits must convert incoming spike trains into precisely timed firing to indicate the onset of crucial sensory cues or to carry out well-coordinated muscle movements. Birdsong is a remarkable example of a complex, learned and precisely timed natural behavior which is controlled by a brainstem-thalamocortical feedback loop. Projection neurons within the zebra finch cortical nucleus HVC (used as a proper name), produce precisely timed, highly reliable and ultra-sparse neural sequen