Topic: vocal communication

Nicolas Mathevon examines the evolution of vocal communication through an analysis of songs from more than 3,000 passerine species. The study organizes their acoustic diversity into eight basic motifs and relates motif use to social organization, morphology, mating systems and sound transmission. Tropical forest conditions favor simpler signals such as flat whistles that travel effectively through dense habitat. In temperate regions, dense populations, short breeding seasons and stronger sexual selection favor complex signals such as rapid trills, despite their greater degradation during trans

The Gonzalez Lab at UCSF is recruiting a research technician for interdisciplinary work on vocal communication, social behavior, sleep, and neural dynamics. The role combines bird behavior, high-density electrophysiology, optical imaging, closed-loop stimulation, custom instrument development, and Python or MATLAB analysis, with later opportunities to support human EEG and natural-speech studies.

In the social context, animal species depend on vocal communication throughout their life, as they are the primary source of communication, yet the neurophysiological underpinnings of the perception of intra-specific communication signals are still poorly understood. The brain processes underpinning the capacity to discern between familiar and unfamiliar vocalizations is still in infancy among avian species. Previous studies have demonstrated that zebra finch neurons in the secondary auditory cortex (caudomedial nidopallium or NCM) respond differently to distant calls from familiar conspecific

The evolution of speech is considered to be one of the hardest problems in science. Studies of the communicative abilities of our closest living relatives, the nonhuman primates, aim to contribute to a better understanding of the emergence of this uniquely human capability. Following a brief introduction over the key building blocks that make up the human speech faculty, I will focus on the question of meaning in nonhuman primate vocalizations. While nonhuman primate calls may be highly context specific, thus giving rise to the notion of ‘referentiality’, comparisons across closely related spe