The 'Song' System

The not so dedicated song system

This was actually the first project I worked on, and continues to be a major area of research in the lab, although my focus is more on behavior.

Like humans, songbirds learn to vocalize through experience, and this made songbirds an important model for studying motor learning generally and vocal learning in particular. However prior work, especially with female songbirds, suggested that the same regions that are necessary for song production and song learning are also involved in other social behaviors, including non-song call timing, song analysis, and csd production. (Check out my review on the subject).

Using a range of neural recording, neural tracing, and lesion approaches, I’ve worked to test these hypotheses. Many of these experiments have been taken over by Jessie Burke, who is preparing manuscripts which will be submitted soon. Stay tuned for that, but it seems clear that the song system has a more complex role in guiding social behavior than just learning and producing song.