Date: August 13, 2018
Source: ETH Zurich
Children are constantly learning
new things, but whether they find it easy or hard to generalise what they have
learned and apply it to new situations can depend on how they learned it. It is
much the same for songbirds. In their first few months of life, they too must
learn a great deal; for example, the characteristic song of their species. And
like people, birds also learn in different ways. How these methods impact the
ability to generalise was the subject of a study on zebra finches, conducted by
a research team led by Richard Hahnloser, Professor at ETH Zurich and the
University of Zurich.
In their experiments, the
researchers were able to show that zebra finches can learn by observing fellow
members of their species. The birds had to learn through trial and error to
discriminate between two classes of birdsong, one long and one short. Without
any special preparation, the median number of repetitions it took for the birds
to master the task was 4,700. But if the finches were able to observe other
finches as they learned this task, then it took them just 900 repetitions. In
this experimental set up and for statistical reasons, 800 repetitions are
required in order to evaluate the animals' performance. This means that the
observing birds mastered the task almost from the very beginning.
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