Topic: vocal exploration

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

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