Nature Communications (Nov 2017)

Songbirds work around computational complexity by learning song vocabulary independently of sequence

  • Dina Lipkind,
  • Anja T. Zai,
  • Alexander Hanuschkin,
  • Gary F. Marcus,
  • Ofer Tchernichovski,
  • Richard H. R. Hahnloser

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01436-0
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 1
pp. 1 – 11

Abstract

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Efficiently imitating a complex motor sequence such as birdsong is a computationally intensive problem. Here the authors show that young zebra finches learn new songs using a non-optimal strategy that prioritizes efficient learning of syllable vocabulary over syllable sequence.