Given this is my first post on GNXP I guess the first place to start is with a brief background: my main areas of study are focused on language, evolution and anything else unfortunate enough to find itself in between. Over the last year much of my time was spent at Edinburgh University, where I graduated with an MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition. More recently, however, I’ve found myself focusing on gene-culture co-evolution, cumulative culture and demography. So I suppose my role at GNXP will largely involve me expounding upon all these areas of research – something I’ll begin fairly soon. Until then, here’s an abstract of a very interesting paper I read this morning on nonhuman vocal learning in Bengalese Finch:

Humans learn to speak by a process of vocal imitation that requires the availability of auditory feedback. Similarly, young birds rely on auditory feedback when learning to imitate the songs of adult birds, providing one of the few examples of nonhuman vocal learning. However, although humans continue to use auditory feedback to correct vocal errors in adulthood, the mechanisms underlying the stability of adult birdsong are unknown. We found that, similar to human speech, adult birdsong is maintained by error correction. We perturbed the pitch (fundamental frequency) of auditory feedback in adult Bengalese finches using custom-designed headphones. Birds compensated for the imposed auditory error by adjusting the pitch of song. When the perturbation was removed, pitch returned to baseline. Our results indicate that adult birds correct vocal errors by comparing auditory feedback to a sensory target and suggest that lifelong error correction is a general principle of learned vocal behavior.

If you noticed my highlighted section then, yes, I do have a picture of said headphones, stylishly modelled by Ben Finch:

Besides the picture, the paper’s well worth reading for those of you interested in language-learning and its relationship to song-learning in Finches.

Citation: Sober & Brainard. Adult birdsong is actively maintained by error connection. Nature Neuroscience, 2009; 12 (7): 927-932 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2336.