Zebra finches

…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

Juvenile male zebra finches learn to produce a single, highly stereotyped song and maintain this song over the course of their adult lives using auditory feedback. Much of what we know of the underlying learning process comes from studies of adult male zebra finches adapting to white noise feedback triggered by either high or low-pitch variants of harmonic stack syllables --- a single static perturbation of a single, simple syllable of a crystallized song. However, zebra finch song is spectrally and temporally rich, with numerous degrees of freedom, and the dynamic learning process must tackle

…The hierarchical structure of the Zebra Finches' song makes it ideal for in-depth analysis of auditory decoding. We use stacked Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) deep neural networks to decode the amplitude envelope and the time-locked envelope features of zebra finch songs. To a

…In songbirds, male juvenile zebra finches mimic the vocalizations of adults. Even in adulthood, their song may undergo slight modifications. The circuits underlying song learning and plasticity are called the song system.The song system, including the BGT loop and motor pathway, assesses vocal performance and controls song execution. The lateral magnocellular nucleus of the

Birds use a rich repertoire of vocalizations for communication. They use songs to attract mates, alarm calls to alert other birds of danger, and distance calls to contact partners when they aren’t in sight. Despite the crucial importance of vocal communication to birds, little is known about how sounds are processed in the avian brain. Previous research on semantic encoding in the avian auditory cortex has focused on the activity of individual neurons. Recent advancements in computational neuroscience point towards a population doctrine, wherein information is encoded not in the activity of in

…studies have demonstrated that zebra finch neurons in the secondary auditory cortex (caudomedial nidopallium or NCM) respond differently to distant calls from familiar conspecific

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

…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 male zebra finches, the premotor nucleus HVC is responsible for the precise control of song tempo. Current computational models of HVC rely on synfire chains, a purely feedforward network model that can account for HVC sequential activity. Synfire chains are however

…Therefore, we paired zebra finches with a vocal robot (1Hz call playback) and measured the bird’s call response t