Performance variability enables adaptive plasticity of ‘crystallized’ adult birdsong

Tumer, Evren C.; Brainard, Michael S.

doi:10.1038/nature06390

Cited by 408 publications

(461 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…plasticity in a songbird (Tumer and Brainard 2007). Although the precise function of behavioral variability remains unknown, some experimental studies indicate that variability is actively regulated, suggesting that variability could serve a function.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Modulation of Sequence and Syllable Variability in Adult Birdsong

Sakata¹,

Hampton²,

Brainard³

2008

Journal of Neurophysiology

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Modulation of Sequence and Syllable Variability in Adult Birdsong

Sakata¹,

Hampton²,

Brainard³

2008

Journal of Neurophysiology

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100

161

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“…Indeed, birds can adapt their songs to escape from negatively reinforcing acoustic stimuli that are delivered during low-pitch renditions of their songs (33). In these operant conditioning experiments, birds were found to be unable to adapt their songs to escape negative reinforcement when the latency between pitch measurements and acoustic stimuli was 100 ms (33), revealing that birds are able to detect correlations between their songs and auditory stimuli when latencies of the latter are short but not when they are long.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidence for a causal inverse model in an avian cortico-basal ganglia circuit

Giret

Kornfeld²,

Ganguli

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Learning by imitation is fundamental to both communication and social behavior and requires the conversion of complex, nonlinear sensory codes for perception into similarly complex motor codes for generating action. To understand the neural substrates underlying this conversion, we study sensorimotor transformations in songbird cortical output neurons of a basal-ganglia pathway involved in song learning. Despite the complexity of sensory and motor codes, we find a simple, temporally specific, causal correspondence between them. Sensory neural responses to song playback mirror motor-related activity recorded during singing, with a temporal offset of roughly 40 ms, in agreement with short feedback loop delays estimated using electrical and auditory stimulation. Such matching of mirroring offsets and loop delays is consistent with a recent Hebbian theory of motor learning and suggests that cortico-basal ganglia pathways could support motor control via causal inverse models that can invert the rich correspondence between motor exploration and sensory feedback.lateral magnocellular nucleus of the anterior nidopallium | Hebbian learning | mirror neuron

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“…This technique was developed by Tumer and Brainard (66). It combines real-time sound analysis with specific manipulations of auditory feedback.…”

Section: Hypothesis-driven Song-learning Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantification of developmental birdsong learning from the subsyllabic scale to cultural evolution

Lipkind

Tchernichovski

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Quantitative analysis of behavior plays an important role in birdsong neuroethology, serving as a common denominator in studies spanning molecular to system-level investigation of sensory-motor conversion, developmental learning, and pattern generation in the brain. In this review, we describe the role of behavioral analysis in facilitating cross-level integration. Modern sound analysis approaches allow investigation of developmental song learning across multiple time scales. Combined with novel methods that allow experimental control of vocal changes, it is now possible to test hypotheses about mechanisms of vocal learning. Further, song analysis can be done at the population level across generations to track cultural evolution and multigenerational behavioral processes. Complementing the investigation of song development with noninvasive brain imaging technology makes it now possible to study behavioral dynamics at multiple levels side by side with developmental changes in brain connectivity and in auditory responses.B irdsong neuroethology is a small but diverse and influential subfield of neuroscience, studied in ∼100 laboratories, and covering a range of research areas spanning the molecular to the organismal levels of investigation. The quantification of singing behavior has been a common denominator across most of those studies. Over the past four decades, birdsong neuroethology has made tremendous gains by incorporating existing tools for representing and analyzing sound (1). The sonogram (Fig. 1A) (2-4) provides an excellent descriptive model of singing behavior, and over the past decade several analysis approaches were developed that allow automatic segmentation categorization and comparison of vocal sounds (5-9). In this review, we describe the role of behavioral analysis in the progress made in birdsong neuroethology research.The past 20 y or so have seen rapid progress in understanding the neural and molecular processes involved in song. However, this progress was preceded by a long tradition of quantifying singing behavior (10, 11). Birdsong is uniquely amenable and attractive for behavioral analysis for a number of reasons: adult song is a structured behavior, repeated with a high degree of stereotypy (Fig. 1A). This makes it relatively easy to detect and characterize song structure and components (e.g., notes, syllables, motifs, and phrases) to align song renditions to each other, to assess the degree of similarity between songs, and, ultimately, to relate singing behavior to neuronal events and thus elucidate underlying neural mechanisms. We start by reviewing the role of behavioral quantification in achieving integration across levels of investigation. We then present a short outline of sound analysis techniques currently used for the tracking of developmental song learning, and an experimental approach for hypothesis-driven investigation of song development. Finally, we present a generalization of behavioral analysis to the population and cross-generation levels, and propose some ideas about n...

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Performance variability enables adaptive plasticity of ‘crystallized’ adult birdsong

Cited by 408 publications

References 29 publications

Social Modulation of Sequence and Syllable Variability in Adult Birdsong

Social Modulation of Sequence and Syllable Variability in Adult Birdsong

Evidence for a causal inverse model in an avian cortico-basal ganglia circuit

Quantification of developmental birdsong learning from the subsyllabic scale to cultural evolution

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