Topic: song crystallization

Just as humans often follow the instructions of a tutor to learn new skills, juvenile male zebra finches learn to sing by copying the song of an adult tutor, providing a powerful system for analyzing tutor-driven learning from both behavioral and neurobiological perspectives. Decades of work have characterized the general trajectory of this learning process [1,2], but recent work using generative modeling methods like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) has opened entirely new avenues for analyzing song learning [3,4]. While it is generally agreed that juveniles learn to sing by using auditory fee

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