Call-based vocal communication of individually recorded zebra finches changes in social groups across reproductive stages and is related with successful egg laying.
Song learning accuracy can be predicted and traced in the structural properties of the brains of juvenile male zebra finches already at 20 days post-hatching.
Pathogens, particularly viruses, target the same genes over deep evolutionary time, resulting in shared signatures of positive selection and transcriptional responses at the same genes.
Songbirds discriminate synthetic sounds composed of temporal patterns of clicks, which they transform into distinct ensemble or spatial patterns in successive stages of neural auditory processing.
Building on simple unsupervised matrix factorization techniques, the seqNMF algorithm successfully recovers neural sequences in a wide range of simulated and real datasets.
Gene manipulation combined with behavior analysis reveals a role of miR-9 in modulating basal-ganglia-dependent developmental vocal learning and adult vocal performance via regulating the FOXP1/FOXP2 gene network and dopamine signaling in songbirds.
The cerebellum sends a functional input to the song-related basal ganglia via the thalamus in songbirds that can modify premotor activity, and it participates to song learning in juvenile birds.
