Topic: songbirds

Juvenile songbirds learn to imitate adult vocalizations. Song acquisition and production is governed by a dedicated neural circuitry that involves two parallel pathways: a cortical pathway required for production and a basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical (BG) pathway necessary for plasticity. The BG pathway induces variability in production during vocal exploration, receives a performance signal via midbrain dopaminergic projections and drives a motor bias that corrects vocal errors. This dopamine-modulated change in vocal output, induced by the BG is gradually consolidated within the cortical path

Songbirds provide a powerful model system for studying sensory-motor learning. Many analyses require time-consuming manual annotation of the units of song, often called syllables. However, songbirds produce many more songs than can be annotated by hand, creating a bottleneck that limits the questions researchers can answer. Methods exist for automated annotation[1], but, as we show, these methods exhibit limitations when applied to songs with many syllable types and variable transitions. To address these issues, we developed an artificial neural network, TweetyNet[2], that segments and labels

Many complex behaviors involve sequences of basic motor or vocal elements governed by syntactic rules, which facilitate flexible and adaptive actions. Songbirds that crystallize their repertoire of vocal syllables and syllable-to-syllable transitions allow researchers to build probabilistic models of syntax rules, providing insight into underlying neural mechanisms. However, in many complex behaviors, syntax rules change over time, such as during learning or in response to new environmental and social contexts. Here, we investigated the songs of canaries, a seasonal songbird. Canaries learn a