Bird song is commonly regarded as amale trait that has evolved through sexual selection. However, recent research has prompted a re-evaluation of this view by demonstrating that female song is an ancestral and phylogenetically widespread trait. Species with female song provide opportunities to study selective pressures and mechanisms specific to females within the wider context of social compet...

An important area of research in neuroscience is understanding what properties of brain structure and function are stimulated by sensory experience and behavioral performance. We tested the roles of experience and behavior in seasonal plasticity of the neural circuits that regulate learned song behavior in adult songbirds. Neurons in these circuits receive auditory input and show selective audi...

Neuronal activity in the hyperstriatum ventrale, pars caudale (HVc) is associated with and necessary for the production of song by songbirds. HVc neurons also respond to acoustic stimuli. The present investigation assessed the auditory response properties of neurons in HVc by testing with the individual bird's own (autogenous) song and the songs of conspecific birds. Throughout HVc, multiunit c...

Birdsong is a learned motor skill that is performed with a high degree of stereotypy in adult birds. Nevertheless, even in species where song "crystallizes" in a form that remains stable over time, there is residual variability. Such variability in well-learned skills is often construed as uncontrolled and irrelevant biological "noise." However, studies in the zebra finch indicate that variabil...

Research on avian song learning has traditionally been based on an instructional model, as exemplified by the sensorimotor model of song development. Several large-scale, species-wide field studies of learned birdsongs have revealed that variation is narrowly restricted to certain aspects of song structure. Other aspects are sufficiently stereotyped and so widely shared by species' members that...

Song-matching has been hypothesized to be a signal of aggressive intentions whereby matching an opponent signals that the singer is likely to attack. Theory predicts that an aggressive signal should impose a cost that enforces the signal’s reliability. A receiver-dependent cost imposed by the matched bird’s aggressive retaliation has been proposed for song-matching. We tested for such a cost fo...