Two brain regions interact to
help finches know when and how to tailor their songs for specific situations
Date: November 16, 2017
Source: University of California - San Francisco
Researchers at UC San Francisco
have shown how the Bengalese finch, a domesticated songbird, can learn to tweak
its song in specific ways depending on context, which could shed light on how
the human brain learns to apply different rules depending on the situation, and
have implications for understanding human language and movement disorders.
The study, published November 16,
2017, in Neuron, showed that finches switch from generic to specific
versions of their songs depending on the situation they are in. What's more,
the researchers identified two distinct areas in the birds' brains dedicated to
this learning process: one region that encodes generalizable rules to produce
default songs, and another area that can override the default pathway to
produce different sounds for different contexts.
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