Topic: juvenile zebra finches

Many of our most impressive skills, from speech to music, evolve across many dimensions and are learned spontaneously without external reinforcement. While we know much about how the basal ganglia contribute to learning low-dimensional, externally reinforced behaviors like lever pressing, their contribution to learning high-dimensional behaviors is less clear. Birdsong learning is a paradigmatic example of high-dimensional learning. Juvenile songbirds vary many acoustic dimensions as they learn to copy their tutor’s song, a spontaneous process that evolves without external reinforcement. While

Similar to how human infants learn to speak, juvenile zebra finches learn to sing by memorizing and then matching their vocalizations to their tutor’s song (TS）during the developmental critical period. We previously identified a neuronal substrate of tutor song memories in the avian analog of secondary auditory cortex, the caudomedial nidopallium (NCM) (Yanagihara and Yazaki-Sugiyama, 2016). Recently, we found a transient projection into the song premotor area, HVC, from the NCM neurons which were specifically activated by hearing TS and by using activity-dependent viral expression of EGFP (AA