Topic: tutor song

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

In nature, many skilled behaviors are learned without explicit reinforcement. Instead, this learning is thought to be guided by an internal estimate of performance error, yet the mechanisms by which such estimates are acquired remain unknown. In male zebra finches, juveniles are first tutored by an adult male during a sensory learning phase, followed by a sensorimotor phase in which they practice by themselves in order to replicate the song. Inspired by models of corollary discharge and predictive coding, we hypothesize that in the sensory phase, juvenile auditory areas gradually learn to canc