Singing Birds Tend To Correct Small Errors More Quickly Than Big Mistakes While Singing

Scientists have discovered how songbirds correct small errors quicker than big mistakes. This study can also help in vocal rehabilitation in humans, according to Science Daily.

Biologist Samuel Sober conducted the study with physiologist Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, which included Bengalese finches as a model. They studied how the mechanism of their brains works in order to learn things and how these birds correct mistakes in their tunes.

"We've built the first mathematical model that uses a bird's previous sensorimotor experience to predict its ability to learn," said Sober in a report by Science Daily. "We hope it will help us understand the math of learning in other species, including humans."

Sober explained young birds learn to vocalize by listening to adult birds just like human babies do. Sober conducted the research on Bengalese finches since they hatched from their eggs. He found that these young born birds started to imitate their adults.

"At first, their song is extremely variable and disorganized," Sober said. "It's baby talk, basically."

These young finches make numerous mistakes initially and listening to their own sounds they correct their mistakes. Whereas, elder birds like human adults make minimum mistakes. According to a theory, adults focus on smaller errors and screen out bigger mistakes, reports Science Daily.

"To correct any mistake, the brain has to rely on the senses," Sober said. "The problem is, the senses are unreliable. If there is noise in the environment, for example, the brain may think it misheard and ignore the sensory experience.

"Whether you are an opera singer or a bird, there is always variability in your sounds. When the brain receives an error in pitch, it seems to use this very simple and elegant strategy of evaluating the probability of whether the error was just extraneous 'noise,' a problem reading the signal, or an actual mistake in the vocalization," he said.

The experiment conducted on adult finches were fitted with light weight headphones to identify the link between the response by the brain to identify and rectify small or a big error and the size of the vocal error.

"When we made small pitch shifts, the birds learned really well and corrected their errors rapidly," Sober said. "As we made the pitch shifts bigger, the birds learned less well, until at a certain pitch, they stopped learning."

"We hope that our mathematical framework for how songbirds learn to sing could help in the development of human behavioral therapies for vocal rehabilitation, as well as increase our general understanding of how the brain learns," Sober said, reported Science Daily.

This research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).