Shared learning method: Human infants and zebra finches both develop complex vocalizations through social feedback from caregivers or adult birds. Experiments across species: Three studies—two with ...

Scientists have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song. Their research lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people ...

We are all born completely helpless, with little of the knowledge and skills we will need to survive as adults. Even our ability to communicate is almost entirely learned from our parents or ...

The vocalizations of humans, bats, whales, seals and songbirds vastly differ from each other. Humans and birds, for example, are separated by some 300 million years of evolution. But scientists ...

A symphony of synapses fires every time a songbird sings. For Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, the neural pathways he finds particularly interesting inside a bird’s brain are ...

Many animal species that live in groups are known to adjust their behavior to strengthen their social bonds or increase their coordination with others around them. For instance, humans and some other ...

Vocal learning occurs in three clades of birds: hummingbirds, parrots, and songbirds. Examining vocal communication within the Falconiformes (sister taxon to the parrot/songbird clade) may offer ...

In reinforcement learning (RL) agents are typically tasked with maximizing a single objective function such as reward. But it remains poorly understood how agents might pursue distinct objectives at ...

For decades, scientists have known that only a few groups of birds—songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds—can learn to produce new sounds. But a new article in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Volume ...

A very interesting study was just published that finds many parrots use words in appropriate contexts. This study, based on an analysis of almost 900 companion parrots as reported by a flock of ...

Human speech is often considered one of the traits that sets our species apart. While many animals communicate with sounds, human language relies on a unique combination of anatomy, brain wiring, and ...

The vocalizations of humans, bats, whales, seals and songbirds vastly differ from each other. But CMU and UC Berkeley researchers have found parts of the genome that have evolved and are associated ...