The human capacity for speech and vocal music depends on vocal imitation. Songbirds, in
contrast to non-human primates, share this vocal production learning with humans. The …

Songbirds learn a correspondence between vocal-motor output and auditory feedback
during development. For neurons in a motor cortex analog of adult zebra finches, we show …

We can recognize the melody of a familiar song when it is played on different musical
instruments. Similarly, an animal must be able to recognize a warning call whether the caller …

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 …

Birdsong is a complex vocal behavior learned during early life in a process similar to the
learning of human speech 1. Like speech, singing is a social behavior—male songbirds …

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 …

Many learned behaviors are thought to require the activity of high-level neurons that
represent categories of complex signals, such as familiar faces or native speech sounds …

▪ Abstract Human speech and birdsong have numerous parallels. Both humans and
songbirds learn their complex vocalizations early in life, exhibiting a strong dependence on …

Learning typically increases the strength of responses and the number of neurons that
respond to training stimuli. Few studies have explored representational plasticity using …

Humans and animals must often discriminate between complex natural sounds in the
presence of competing sounds (maskers). Although the auditory cortex is thought to be …