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. 2022 Oct 24;32(20):R1090-R1094.
doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.006.

Birdsong

Affiliations

Birdsong

Richard Mooney. Curr Biol. .

Abstract

Have your ever felt as happy as a lark, feathered your nest or taken someone under your wing? As we watch birds, we cannot help but be struck by their uncannily familiar behaviors - singing, nest building, caring for their young - to name just a few. Songbirds - the oscine suborder of perching birds that constitute roughly half (∼4,000) of all known avian species - are noted for the songs that males and sometimes both sexes in this group sing to court mates and defend territory from rivals. Birdsongs contain several to many acoustically distinct syllables, typically organized into a stereotyped phrase, and span the same audio bandwidth that we exploit for speech and music, making them easy for us to hear and appreciate. Consequently, eavesdropping humans long ago detected the most striking parallel between songbirds and humans: juvenile songbirds learn to sing in a manner similar to a child learning to speak.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of interests The author declares no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Juvenile songbirds learn to sing by copying a tutor song.
(A) Top: adult male tutor (left) and a juvenile male pupil (right) and a timeline of song learning over the first 100 days of the juvenile’s life. Bottom: sound spectrograms of the song motif produced by the tutor, and representative songs produced by the pupil prior to tutoring (~40 days), during sensorimotor learning (~65 days) and as an adult. Introductory note and syllables denoted by “i” and letters A–C, respectively. Scale bars in the tutor song spectrogram are 1 kHz and 50 msec. (B) Two-dimensional UMAP projections of tutor and pupil songs projected from latent embeddings generated by a variational autoencoder, an unsupervised learning algorithm, show that the song of a pupil and his tutor are more similar to each other than to other pupils and tutors. (Photograph of tutor and pupil courtesy of Sarah M.N. Woolley; VAE UMAP from Goffinet et al. (2021).)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.. The songbird brain contains specialized neural circuits for singing and song learning.
(Left) A sagittal view of the songbird brain showing major forebrain and midbrain components of the song system. The song motor pathway includes the telencephalic nuclei HVC and RA, which in turn projects to the vocal respiratory brainstem to influence song patterning. The anterior forebrain pathway is essential to sensorimotor learning, and includes a song specialized region of the basal ganglia (sBG, also known as Area X) and its inputs from dopamine-releasing neurons in the midbrain ventral tegmental area (VTA). (Right) A flow chart emphasizing similarities between the anterior forebrain pathway and mammalian cortical-basal ganglia pathways. HVC, used as a proper name; RA, the robust nucleus of the arcopallium; LMAN, the lateral part of the magnocellular nucleus of the nidopallium; DLM, the dorsolateral part of the medial thalamus; SNs, spiny neurons.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.. Reinforcement signals transmitted from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the song basal ganglia (sBG) drive song learning.
(A) Schematic showing method to record from antidromically identified VTA neurons that innervate the sBG. (B) Sound spectrogram showing a target syllable without feedback distortion in the first motif and an ensuing motif where auditory feedback associated with the target syllable was distorted by playing a sound through a nearby speaker. (Adapted from Gadagkar et al. (2016).) (C) After several days of distorted feedback experience, delivered randomly on half of the renditions, VTA neurons fire bursts of action potentials n undistorted renditions and pause their firing on distorted feedback renditions (from Gadagkar et al. (2016)). This behavior is similar to that of reward prediction error-encoding neurons in the mammalian VTA. (D) Schematic showing approach for optogenetically stimulating VTA axon terminals in the sBG. (E) After measuring the baseline variability of a target syllable, renditions with a fundamental frequency (‘pitch’) above the mean value trigger optogenetic stimulation of VTA terminals. (Adapted from Hisey et al. (2018).) (F) Mean pitch values (black and red dots) of the target syllable before (day 0) or 1–4 days after pairing high pitch renditions with VTA terminal stimulation. The threshold for stimulation is shown by the dashed line, and renditions that fall above the threshold from day 1 onwards are shown in red. All renditions are from a subset of trials where the laser is off, indicating that the upward shift in syllable pitch is a persistent effect of prior VTA terminal stimulation.

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