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 ...

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 ...

Using histology and ex vivo diffusion MRI tractography (dMRI), Peter Cook and colleagues examined postmortem brains from harbor seals, elephant seals, California sea lions, and coyotes (as a non-vocal ...

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 ...

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 ...

Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal. The discovery, reported in today's ...

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. Figure 3: Progressive song change in adult mutants. The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. The ...

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 ...

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 neuroscientist Erich Jarvis discovered that songbirds' vocal skills and humans' spoken language are both rooted in neural pathways for controlling learned movements. When Erich Jarvis, a ...