Zebra finch

…insights into the mechanisms by which zebra finch songbirds learn to sing. Dopamine has been long thought to guide reward-based trial-and-error learning by encoding reward prediction errors. Ho

…insights into the mechanisms by which zebra finch songbirds learn to sing. Dopamine has been long thought to guide reward-based trial-and-error learning by encoding reward prediction errors. Ho

Animal vocal sequences including human speech are organized into hierarchical sequences composed of voice primitives. In human speech, these primitives are known as phonemes or phones. By contrast, the corresponding vocal primitives in animals have been poorly studied. What sets of vocal gestures span the vocal repertoire of an animal and what regularities apply to animal vocal repertoires across individuals and across species? In birdsong, the roughly hundred-millisecond long song syllables are often considered basic vocal units, since syllables display little acoustic variability within t

…Songbirds, especially the zebra finch with its hierarchical song structure, provide valuable models for studying neural representations of complex sounds. In this study, we recorded zebra finches' neural activity from the auditory pallium during song processing using a movable electrode array, collecting data from 51 recording sites. We employed stacked bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) deep neural networks to decode the amplitude envelope and time-locked envelope features of the songs. To evaluate h

…Conversely, songbirds, such as the zebra finch (Taenopygia guttata), develop their vocal communication (song) through social learning, making them a potentially valuable model for human speech development. Zebra finches, highly social colonial

…basal ganglia nucleus, in the zebra finch contains thousands of neurons and a million synapses and different glial cell types: astr

…Projection neurons within the zebra finch cortical nucleus HVC (used as a proper name), produce precisely timed, highly reliable and ultra-sparse neural sequen

…In the zebra finch we asked how thalamocortical input contributes to song dynamics. Birdsong is controlled by a brainstem-thalamocortical feedback loop. The premotor cortical region HVC (proper name) contains projection neurons that produce precisely timed, highly reliable and ultra-sparse spike burst sequences that underlie song dynamics. The origin of these bursts is debated. One model posits that bursts are gen

The songbird zebra finch is an exemplary model system in which to study trial-and-error learning, as the bird learns its single song gradually through the production of many noisy renditions. It is also a good system in which to study the maintenance of motor skills, as the adult bird actively maintains its song and retains some residual plasticity. Motor learning occurs through the association of timing within the song, represented by sparse firing in nucleus HVC, with motor output, driven by nucleus RA. Here we show through modeling that the small level of observed variability in HVC can res