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AUDITORY LEARNING

Birds of a different feather sing together

A new study sheds light on how sensitivity to communication sounds is established in the brain. Juvenile finches raised with tutors of either the same or different species always learned the tutors’ songs. Cortical neurons developed selectivity for the learned song by tuning for its secondary acoustic features.

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Fig. 1: Learning the bird’s song drives changes in the auditory cortex.

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Correspondence to Maria N. Geffen.

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Williams, A., Geffen, M.N. Birds of a different feather sing together. Nat Neurosci 22, 1381–1382 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0485-1

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