NDLI: Social performance reveals unexpected vocal competency in young songbirds

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Kojima, Satoshi Doupe, Allison J.
Abstract	Vocal ontogeny in songbirds provides a good model for understanding how complex motor behavior, including speech, is learned. For birdsong, as for other motor learning, it has generally been assumed that a subject's motor output at any point during learning represents what the subject has learned to produce by that time. Here, we show, however, that juvenile zebra finches partway through song learning, singing immature song, are capable of producing song with much more mature properties, depending on the behavioral context. In these birds, we were able to elicit courtship (female-directed) song, which young birds normally sing infrequently, and to compare it with the alone or “undirected” song (Undir) predominantly produced during learning as well as with the same bird's subsequent adult song. We found that the juvenile courtship song was much less variable than the immature Undir and as stereotyped as the adult song produced after a further month of practice. More strikingly, the juvenile courtship song was also acoustically much more similar than Undir to the adult song. This finding demonstrates that the Undir that juvenile birds usually produce underestimates the extent of learning and that song structure is learned faster than previously thought. Moreover, the rapid improvement in song quality in response to external social cues supports the idea that courtship singing is a state of motor “performance,” in which the bird selects the best variants of the song learned during singing alone, and suggests that such performance states can reveal unappreciated progression of learning.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010502108
Ending Page	1692
Page Count	6
Starting Page	1687
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00278424
e-ISSN	10916490
Journal	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Issue Number	4
Volume Number	108
Language	English
Publisher	National Academy of Sciences
Publisher Date	2011-01-25
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	National Academy of Sciences
Subject Keyword	General Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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