Forkhead box protein P2 (FOXP2) is a protein that, in humans, is encoded by the FOXP2 gene. FOXP2 is a member of the forkhead box family of transcription factors, proteins that regulate gene expression by binding to DNA. It is expressed in the brain, heart, lungs and digestive system.
Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs are distinguished by function from calls.
Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but does not yet produce any recognizable words. Babbling begins shortly after birth and progresses through several stages as the infant's repertoire of sounds expands and vocalizations become more speech-like. Infants typically begin to produce recognizable words when they are around 12 months of age, though babbling may continue for some time afterward.
The Australian zebra finch or chestnut-eared finch is the most common estrildid finch of Central Australia. It ranges over most of the continent, avoiding only the cool humid south and some areas of the tropical far north. The bird has been introduced to Puerto Rico and Portugal. Due to the ease of keeping and breeding the zebra finch in captivity, it has become Australia’s most widely studied bird; by 2010, it was the most studied captive model passerine species worldwide, by a considerable margin.
Neuroethology is the evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of animal behavior and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system. It is an interdisciplinary science that combines both neuroscience and ethology. A central theme of neuroethology, which differentiates it from other branches of neuroscience, is its focus on behaviors that have been favored by natural selection rather than on behaviors that are specific to a particular disease state or laboratory experiment.
Known as the Society finch in North America and the Bengali finch or Bengalese finch elsewhere, Lonchura striata domestica is a domesticated finch not found in nature. It became a popular cage and trade bird after appearing in European zoos in the 1860s where it was imported from Japan. There have been many theories of the origin of domestication for the Bengalese finch, and we now know it took place primarily in Japan. Coloration and behavior were modified through centuries of selection in Asia, then later in Europe and North America.
A song system, also known as a song control system (SCS), is a series of discrete brain nuclei involved in the production and learning of song in songbirds. It was first observed by Fernando Nottebohm in 1976 in a paper titled "Central control of song in the canary, Serinus canarius", published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.
Mriganka Sur is the Newton Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Simons Center for the Social Brain at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and N.R. Narayana Murthy Distinguished Chair in Computational Brain Research at the Centre for Computational Brain Research, IIT Madras. He was on the Life Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2010 and has been serving as Jury Chair from 2018.
Vocal learning is the ability to modify acoustic and syntactic sounds, acquire new sounds via imitation, and produce vocalizations. "Vocalizations" in this case refers only to sounds generated by the vocal organ as opposed to by the lips, teeth, and tongue, which require substantially less motor control. A rare trait, vocal learning is a critical substrate for spoken language and has only been detected in eight animal groups despite the wide array of vocalizing species; these include humans, bats, cetaceans, pinnipeds, elephants, and three distantly related bird groups including songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds. Vocal learning is distinct from auditory learning, or the ability to form memories of sounds heard, a relatively common trait which is present in all vertebrates tested. For example, dogs can be trained to understand the word "sit" even though the human word is not in its innate auditory repertoire. However, the dog cannot imitate and produce the word "sit" itself as vocal learners can.
Cornelia Isabella "Cori" Bargmann is an American neurobiologist. She is known for her work on the genetic and neural circuit mechanisms of behavior using C. elegans, particularly the mechanisms of olfaction in the worm. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and had been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at UCSF and then Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2016. She was the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative from 2016 to 2022. In 2012 she was awarded the $1 million Kavli Prize, and in 2013 the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Conspecific song preference is the ability songbirds require to distinguish conspecific song from heterospecific song in order for females to choose an appropriate mate, and for juvenile males to choose an appropriate song tutor during vocal learning. Researchers studying the swamp sparrow have demonstrated that young birds are born with this ability, because juvenile males raised in acoustic isolation and tutored with artificial recordings choose to learn only songs that contain their own species' syllables. Studies conducted at later life stages indicate that conspecific song preference is further refined and strengthened throughout development as a function of social experience. The selective response properties of neurons in the songbird auditory pathway has been proposed as the mechanism responsible for both the innate and acquired components of this preference.
The neuroscience of rhythm refers to the various forms of rhythm generated by the central nervous system (CNS). Nerve cells, also known as neurons in the human brain are capable of firing in specific patterns which cause oscillations. The brain possesses many different types of oscillators with different periods. Oscillators are simultaneously outputting frequencies from .02 Hz to 600 Hz. It is now well known that a computer is capable of running thousands of processes with just one high-frequency clock. Humans have many different clocks as a result of evolution. Prior organisms had no need for a fast-responding oscillator. This multi-clock system permits quick response to constantly changing sensory input while still maintaining the autonomic processes that sustain life. This method modulates and controls a great deal of bodily functions.
Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.
Sarah M. N. Woolley is a neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. Her work centers on the neuroscience of communication, using songbirds to understand how the brain learns and understands vocal communication.
Ila Fiete is an Indian–American physicist and computational neuroscientist as well as a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences within the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fiete builds theoretical models and analyses neural data and to uncover how neural circuits perform computations and how the brain represents and manipulates information involved in memory and reasoning.
Jessica Cardin is an American neuroscientist who is an associate professor of neuroscience at Yale University School of Medicine. Cardin's lab studies local circuits within the primary visual cortex to understand how cellular and synaptic interactions flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts to give rise to visual perceptions and drive motivated behaviors. Cardin's lab applies their knowledge of adaptive cortical circuit regulation to probe how circuit dysfunction manifests in disease models.
Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.
Stephanie Ann White is an American neuroscientist who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research looks to understand how social interactions impact the brain. She serves as Director of the Neural Systems and Behavior programme at the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Adult neurogenesis is the process in which new neurons are born and subsequently integrate into functional brain circuits after birth and into adulthood. Avian species including songbirds are among vertebrate species that demonstrate particularly robust adult neurogenesis throughout their telencephalon, in contrast with the more limited neurogenic potential that are observed in adult mammals after birth. Adult neurogenesis in songbirds is observed in brain circuits that underlie complex specialized behavior, including the song control system and the hippocampus. The degree of postnatal and adult neurogenesis in songbirds varies between species, shows sexual dimorphism, fluctuates seasonally, and depends on hormone levels, cell death rates, and social environment. The increased extent of adult neurogenesis in birds compared to other vertebrates, especially in circuits that underlie complex specialized behavior, makes birds an excellent animal model to study this process and its functionality. Methods used in research to track adult neurogenesis in birds include the use of thymidine analogues and identifying endogenous markers of neurogenesis. Historically, the discovery of adult neurogenesis in songbirds substantially contributed to establishing the presence of adult neurogenesis and to progressing a line of research tightly associated with many potential clinical applications.
David Forrest Clayton is an American neuroscientist, biochemist, and academic. He is professor and the chair of the Department of Genetics & Biochemistry at Clemson University.
