We examined the neural encoding of synthetic and natural sounds by single neurons in the
auditory system of male zebra finches by estimating the mutual information in the time …

Physiological studies in vocal animals such as songbirds indicate that vocalizations drive
auditory neurons particularly well. But the neural mechanisms whereby vocalizations are …

Complex vocalizations, such as human speech and birdsong, are characterized by their
elaborate spectral and temporal structure. Because auditory neurons of the zebra finch …

Vocal communicators discriminate conspecific vocalizations from other sounds and
recognize the vocalizations of individuals. To identify neural mechanisms for the …

Songbird auditory neurons must encode the dynamics of natural sounds at many volumes.
We investigated how neural coding depends on the distribution of stimulus intensities. Using …

Song learning shapes the response properties of auditory neurons in the song system to
become highly selective for the individual bird's own (“autogenous”) song. The auditory …

The selectivity of neurons in the zebra finch auditory forebrain for natural sounds was
investigated systematically. The principal auditory forebrain area in songbirds consists of the …

In songbirds, species identity and developmental experience shape vocal behavior and
behavioral responses to vocalizations. The interaction of species identity and developmental …

Although understanding the processing of natural sounds is an important goal in auditory
neuroscience, relatively little is known about the neural coding of these sounds. Recently we …

The avian auditory midbrain nucleus, the mesencephalicus lateralis, dorsalis (MLd), is the
first auditory processing stage in which multiple parallel inputs converge, and it provides the …