When Do Finches Learn Their Songs

Published: July 1999

Singing in the brain: song learning in developed zebra finches

Nature Neuroscience book ii,page 590 (1999)Cite this article

Many types of synaptic and behavioral plasticity decline as animals mature, but we withal do non understand what causes adult behaviors to stabilize. Recently in Nature(399, 466– 470, 1999), Anthony Leonardo and Marker Konishi of Caltech reported that zebra finches retain a surprising power to modify their songs in response to auditory experience in machismo. Juvenile male zebra finches ordinarily learn to sing by memorizing the song of an older male, and then using auditory feedback to gradually match their own vocalizations to this 'internal model'. Under normal conditions, mature song production and so remains stable or 'crystallized' throughout adult life, as shown in the top panel. This stability has been proposed to require active maintenance past auditory feedback, equally song gradually deteriorates later deafening in developed birds.

Leonardo and Konishi distorted auditory feedback reversibly, by superimposing time-delayed playback onto the songs produced by adult birds. Inside virtually half-dozen weeks, four of five birds had developed substantial song variability, including stuttering, creation, deletion and distortion of vocal elements, as shown in the lesser panel. When the distorted feedback was removed, the birds' songs gradually returned to their stable adult construction, suggesting that the internal model was unaffected past this manipulation. Thus, developed zebra finches retain the ability to adjust their vocal output, merely differ from juveniles in that they do non seem to change their internal vocal model based on auditory input. These findings propose that stable adult song is maintained by agreement between ongoing auditory feedback and the internal model, rather than because adults lack the power to change their song behavior.