Social connection drives learning in bird brain

Juvenile zebra finches learn songs directly from a tutor—usually their father—through a social interaction that keeps them motivated and on-task. Young birds who simply hear the songs through a speaker, without the tutor's ...

'I know this song!' Evolutionary keys to musical perception

How do we perceive music and sounds? This question is the basis of the research by the Language and Comparative Cognition Group (LCC) of the UPF Center for Brain and Cognition (CBC) published recently in the journal Animal ...

Zebra finch males sing in dialects and females pay attention

Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that dialects do not exist in ...

Not silent yet; the shifting sounds of spring

Natural sounds, and bird song in particular, play a key role in building and maintaining our connection with nature—but a major new study reveals that the sounds of spring are changing, with dawn choruses across North America ...

Songbirds and humans share some common speech patterns

If you listen to songbirds, you will recognize repeated melodies or phrases. Each phrase is made up of distinct sounds, strung together. A study from researchers at McGill University has found that the song phrases of many ...

page 2 from 11