Read by QxMD icon Read


Karagh Murphy, Logan S James, Jon T Sakata, Jonathan F Prather
Sensorimotor integration is the process through which the nervous system creates a link between motor commands and associated sensory feedback. This process allows for the acquisition and refinement of many behaviors, including learned communication behaviors like speech and birdsong. Consequently, it is important to understand fundamental mechanisms of sensorimotor integration, and comparative analyses of this process can provide vital insight. Songbirds offer a powerful comparative model system to study how the nervous system links motor and sensory information for learning and control...
March 22, 2017: Journal of Neurophysiology
Ryosuke O Tachibana, Miki Takahasi, Neal A Hessler, Kazuo Okanoya
Birdsong is a unique model to address learning mechanisms of the timing control of sequential behaviors, with characteristic temporal structures consisting of serial sequences of brief vocal elements (syllables) and silent intervals (gaps). Understanding the neural mechanisms for plasticity of such sequential behavior should be aided by characterization of its developmental changes. Here, we assessed the level of acute vocal plasticity between young and adult Bengalese finches, and also quantified developmental change in variability of temporal structure...
February 11, 2017: Developmental Neurobiology
Yisi S Zhang, Jason D Wittenbach, Dezhe Z Jin, Alexay A Kozhevnikov
Variable motor sequences of animals are often structured and can be described by probabilistic transition rules between action elements. Examples include the songs of many songbird species such as the Bengalese finch, which consist of stereotypical syllables sequenced according to probabilistic rules (song syntax). The neural mechanisms behind such rules are poorly understood. Here we investigate where the song syntax is encoded in the brain of the Bengalese finch by rapidly and reversibly manipulating the temperature in the song production pathway...
February 3, 2017: Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience
MacKenzie Wyatt, Emily A Berthiaume, Conor W Kelly, Samuel J Sober
Like human speech, vocal behavior in songbirds depends critically on auditory feedback. In both humans and songbirds, vocal skills are acquired by a process of imitation whereby current vocal production is compared to an acoustic target. Similarly, performance in adulthood relies strongly on auditory feedback, and online manipulations of auditory signals can dramatically alter acoustic production even after vocalizations have been well learned. Artificially delaying auditory feedback can disrupt both speech and birdsong, and internal delays in auditory feedback have been hypothesized as a cause of vocal dysfluency in persons who stutter...
January 2017: ENeuro
Ilias Bergstrom, Sergio Azevedo, Panos Papiotis, Nuno Saldanha, Mel Slater
We describe an experiment that explores the contribution of auditory and other features to the illusion of plausibility in a virtual environment that depicts the performance of a string quartet. 'Plausibility' refers to the component of presence that is the illusion that the perceived events in the virtual environment are really happening. The features studied were: Gaze (the musicians ignored the participant, the musicians sometimes looked towards and followed the participant's movements), Sound Spatialization (Mono, Stereo, Spatial), Auralization (no sound reflections, reflections corresponding to a room larger than the one perceived, reflections that exactly matched the virtual room), and Environment (no sound from outside of the room, birdsong and wind corresponding to the outside scene)...
January 27, 2017: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Jonathan Prather, Kazuo Okanoya, Johan J Bolhuis
Language as a computational cognitive mechanism appears to be unique to the human species. However, there are remarkable behavioral similarities between song learning in songbirds and speech acquisition in human infants that are absent in non-human primates. Here we review important neural parallels between birdsong and speech. In both cases there are separate but continually interacting neural networks that underlie vocal production, sensorimotor learning, and auditory perception and memory. As in the case of human speech, neural activity related to birdsong learning is lateralized, and mirror neurons linking perception and performance may contribute to sensorimotor learning...
January 10, 2017: Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
Ofer Tchernichovski, Olga Feher, Daniel Fimiarz, Dalton Conley
Distributed social learning may occur at many temporal and spatial scales, but it rarely adds up to a stable culture. Cultures vary in stability and diversity (polymorphism), ranging from chaotic or drifting cultures, through cumulative polymorphic cultures, to stable monolithic cultures with high conformity levels. What features can sustain polymorphism, preventing cultures from collapsing into either chaotic or highly conforming states? We investigate this question by integrating studies across two quite separate disciplines: the emergence of song cultures in birds, and the spread of public opinion and social conventions in humans...
January 1, 2017: Journal of Experimental Biology
Makoto Araki, M M Bandi, Yoko Yazaki-Sugiyama
Juvenile songbirds learn vocal communication from adult tutors of the same species but not from adults of other species. How species-specific learning emerges from the basic features of song prosody remains unknown. In the zebra finch auditory cortex, we discovered a class of neurons that register the silent temporal gaps between song syllables and are distinct from neurons encoding syllable morphology. Behavioral learning and neuronal coding of temporal gap structure resisted song tutoring from other species: Zebra finches fostered by Bengalese finch parents learned Bengalese finch song morphology transposed onto zebra finch temporal gaps...
December 9, 2016: Science
Rodrigo Gogui Alonso, Ana Amador, Gabriel B Mindlin
Birdsong is a learned motor behavior controlled by an interconnected structure of neural nuclei. This pathway is bilaterally organized, with anatomically indistinguishable structures in each brain hemisphere. In this work, we present a computational model whose variables are the average activities of different neural nuclei of the song system of oscine birds. Two of the variables are linked to the air sac pressure and the tension of the labia during canary song production. We show that these time dependent gestures are capable of driving a model of the vocal organ to synthesize realistic canary like songs...
December 8, 2016: Journal of Physiology, Paris
Pawel Fedurek, Klaus Zuberbühler, Christoph D Dahl
December 2, 2016: Scientific Reports
Kantapon Kaewtip, Abeer Alwan, Colm O'Reilly, Charles E Taylor
Automatic phrase detection systems of bird sounds are useful in several applications as they reduce the need for manual annotations. However, birdphrase detection is challenging due to limited training data and background noise. Limited data occur because of limited recordings or the existence of rare phrases. Background noise interference occurs because of the intrinsic nature of the recording environment such as wind or other animals. This paper presents a different approach to birdsong phrase classification using template-based techniques suitable even for limited training data and noisy environments...
November 2016: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
November 28, 2016: ELife
David C Geary
Sexual selection describes the reproductive dynamics that drive the evolution of many sex differences but is rarely used to guide the study of brain development or function. This Mini-Review describes how these dynamics can result in trait elaboration in one sex or the other and why these traits have a heightened sensitivity to stressors. The framework provides a conceptual model that will help to organize what we know about sex differences in brain and cognition, a means to focus the search for additional sex differences, and a means to predict brain systems that are particularly vulnerable to disruption by exposure to stressors...
January 2, 2017: Journal of Neuroscience Research
Caitlin Mencio, Balagurunathan Kuberan, Franz Goller
Neural control of complex vocal behaviors, such as birdsong and speech, requires integration of biomechanical nonlinearities through muscular output. Although control of airflow and tension of vibrating tissues are known functions of vocal muscles, it remains unclear how specific muscle characteristics contribute to specific acoustic parameters. To address this gap, we removed heparan sulfate chains using heparitinases to perturb neuromuscular transmission subtly in the syrinx of adult male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata)...
February 1, 2017: Journal of Neurophysiology
Stefania Casagrande, Rianne Pinxten, Erika Zaid, Marcel Eens
2016: PeerJ
Alexei L Vyssotski, Anna E Stepien, Georg B Keller, Richard H R Hahnloser
What cortical inputs are provided to motor control areas while they drive complex learned behaviors? We study this question in the nucleus interface of the nidopallium (NIf), which is required for normal birdsong production and provides the main source of auditory input to HVC, the driver of adult song. In juvenile and adult zebra finches, we find that spikes in NIf projection neurons precede vocalizations by several tens of milliseconds and are insensitive to distortions of auditory feedback. We identify a local isometry between NIf output and vocalizations: quasi-identical notes produced in different syllables are preceded by highly similar NIf spike patterns...
October 2016: PLoS Biology
Sarah J Alger, Bret R Larget, Lauren V Riters
Complex vocal signals, such as birdsong, contain acoustic elements that differ in both order and duration. These elements may convey socially relevant meaning, both independently and through their interactions, yet statistical methods that combine order and duration data to extract meaning have not, to our knowledge, been fully developed. Here we design novel semi-Markov methods, Bayesian estimation and classification trees to extract order and duration information from behavioural sequences and apply these methods to songs produced by male European starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, in two social contexts in which the function of song differs: a spring (breeding) and autumn (nonbreeding) context...
June 2016: Animal Behaviour
Yiying Hao, Jian Kang, Heinrich Wörtche
This study aims to explore how the soundscape quality of traffic noise environments can be improved by the masking effects of birdsong in terms of four soundscape characteristics, i.e., perceived loudness, naturalness, annoyance and pleasantness. Four factors that may influence the masking effects of birdsong (i.e., distance of the receiver from a sound source, loudness of masker, occurrence frequencies of masker, and visibility of sound sources) were examined by listening tests. The results show that the masking effects are more significant in the road traffic noise environments with lower sound levels (e...
August 2016: Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Beau A Alward, Catherine de Bournonville, Trevor T Chan, Jacques Balthazart, Charlotte A Cornil, Gregory F Ball
Recent evidence has implicated steroid hormones, specifically estrogens, in the rapid modulation of cognitive processes. Songbirds have been a useful model system in the study of complex cognitive processes including birdsong, a naturally learned vocal behavior regulated by a discrete steroid-sensitive telencephalic circuitry. Singing behavior is known to be regulated by long-term actions of estrogens but rapid steroid modulation of this behavior has never been examined. We investigated if acute actions of estrogens regulate birdsong in canaries (Serinus canaria)...
2016: Scientific Reports
Kristofer E Bouchard, Michael S Brainard
Predicting future events is a critical computation for both perception and behavior. Despite the essential nature of this computation, there are few studies demonstrating neural activity that predicts specific events in learned, probabilistic sequences. Here, we test the hypotheses that the dynamics of internally generated neural activity are predictive of future events and are structured by the learned temporal-sequential statistics of those events. We recorded neural activity in Bengalese finch sensory-motor area HVC in response to playback of sequences from individuals' songs, and examined the neural activity that continued after stimulus offset...
Fetch more papers »
Fetching more papers... Fetching...
Remove bar
Read by QxMD icon Read

Search Tips

Use Boolean operators: AND/OR

diabetic AND foot
diabetes OR diabetic

Exclude a word using the 'minus' sign

Virchow -triad

Use Parentheses

water AND (cup OR glass)



Use quotes to search for an exact phrase

"primary prevention of cancer"