Topic: zebra finches

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

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

During conversations we rapidly switch between listening and speaking which often requires withholding or delaying our speech in order to hear others and avoid overlapping. This capacity for vocal turn-taking is exhibited by non-linguistic species as well, however the neural circuit mechanisms that enable us to regulate the precise timing of our vocalizations during interactions are unknown. We aim to identify the neural mechanisms underlying the coordination of vocal interactions. Therefore, we paired zebra finches with a vocal robot (1Hz call playback) and measured the bird’s call response t

Auditory decoding of temporal features is a complex process in which vocalizations such as birdsongs are segmented into distinct auditory units, a crucial step in transforming sound into meaning. The songbird auditory system offers a valuable model for studying the neural representation of complex sounds. 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

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