Song recognition memory in juvenile zebra finches: Effects of varying the number of presentations of heterospecific and conspecific songs

Braaten, Richard F.; Miner, Stephanie; Cybenko, Anne K.

doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2007.10.010

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Many studies investigate song learning and song memorization processes in juveniles (e.g. [55][56][57][58]), but few have assessed the recognition memory of parents. For instance, King penguins Aptenodytes patagonicus can find their offspring among a crèche of thousands of chicks after months of separation [59] or mother northern fur seals Callorhinus ursinus respond to their pup's call even after a four-year separation [60].…”

Section: Ontogenesis Of Individual Vocal Signaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Begging calls support offspring individual identity and recognition by zebra finch parents

Levréro¹,

Durand²,

Vignal³

et al. 2009

Comptes Rendus. Biologies

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In colonial birds, the recognition between parents and their offspring is essential to ensure the exclusivity of parental care. Although individual vocal recognition seems to be a key component of parent-chicks recognition, few studies assessed the period when the emergence of the vocal signature takes place. The present study investigated the acoustic cues of signaler identity carried in the begging calls at three stages of development in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata castanotis), a colonial species which experiences food-dependence after fledging. Testing parents with playback of begging calls recorded the day before fledging, we found that the offspring recognition was based on acoustic cues. Begging calls showed a highly individualized vocal signature well before fledging. The individual identity coding was multi-parametric and encoded in both spectral and temporal domains. These results suggest that the successful recognition process of offspring might be strongly dependent on the receiver's abilities to use multi-parametric acoustic cues. The precocity of the vocal signature in chicks could enable parents to familiarize with the call features of their offspring at the pre-fledging period through a learning process.

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Section: Ontogenesis Of Individual Vocal Signaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Begging calls support offspring individual identity and recognition by zebra finch parents

Levréro¹,

Durand²,

Vignal³

et al. 2009

Comptes Rendus. Biologies

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show abstract

“…Recent empirical studies suggest that non-human animals do not rely on faithful sequence representation when discriminating between sequences of stimuli but instead rely on memory traces of stimuli, where the intensity of the memory for each stimulus decays over time. A comprehensive metastudy, incorporating over 100 discrimination experiments in mammals and birds [23] PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY including, for example, rule learning [31,32], artificial grammar [33][34][35], sequence discrimination [36,37] and birdsong [38,39], shows that the trace memory model can account well for how animals recognize and remember sequences of stimuli, and there are subsequent consistent results from great apes [29,30]. This points to the importance of considering trace memory as an explanation when limited sequence discrimination is observed in similar studies [40][41][42][43][44].…”

Section: Sequential Abilities In Animalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language

Jon-And,

Jonsson,

Lind

et al. 2023

PLoS Comput Biol

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Human language is unique in its compositional, open-ended, and sequential form, and its evolution is often solely explained by advantages of communication. However, it has proven challenging to identify an evolutionary trajectory from a world without language to a world with language, especially while at the same time explaining why such an advantageous phenomenon has not evolved in other animals. Decoding sequential information is necessary for language, making domain-general sequence representation a tentative basic requirement for the evolution of language and other uniquely human phenomena. Here, using formal evolutionary analyses of the utility of sequence representation we show that sequence representation is exceedingly costly and that current memory systems found in animals may prevent abilities necessary for language to emerge. For sequence representation to evolve, flexibility allowing for ignoring irrelevant information is necessary. Furthermore, an abundance of useful sequential information and extensive learning opportunities are required, two conditions that were likely fulfilled early in human evolution. Our results provide a novel, logically plausible trajectory for the evolution of uniquely human cognition and language, and support the hypothesis that human culture is rooted in sequential representational and processing abilities.

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“…Ghirlanda et al [ 23 ] analyzed over 100 stimulus sequence discrimination experiments (from 14 bird and mammal species). The study included data from various test paradigms where animals have been subjected to temporal sequences of stimuli, including, for instance, rule learning [ 66 , 67 ], artificial grammar studies [ 7 , 68 , 69 ], sequence discriminations [ 70 , 71 ], song recognition in birds [ 72 , 73 ], and some clinical studies [ 74 , 75 ]. The analysis found systematic and pervasive errors as expected from a trace memory model, irrespective of the origin of the data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes

Lind,

Vinken,

Jonsson

et al. 2023

PLoS ONE

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Identifying cognitive capacities underlying the human evolutionary transition is challenging, and many hypotheses exist for what makes humans capable of, for example, producing and understanding language, preparing meals, and having culture on a grand scale. Instead of describing processes whereby information is processed, recent studies have suggested that there are key differences between humans and other animals in how information is recognized and remembered. Such constraints may act as a bottleneck for subsequent information processing and behavior, proving important for understanding differences between humans and other animals. We briefly discuss different sequential aspects of cognition and behavior and the importance of distinguishing between simultaneous and sequential input, and conclude that explicit tests on non-human great apes have been lacking. Here, we test the memory for stimulus sequences-hypothesis by carrying out three tests on bonobos and one test on humans. Our results show that bonobos’ general working memory decays rapidly and that they fail to learn the difference between the order of two stimuli even after more than 2,000 trials, corroborating earlier findings in other animals. However, as expected, humans solve the same sequence discrimination almost immediately. The explicit test on whether bonobos represent stimulus sequences as an unstructured collection of memory traces was not informative as no differences were found between responses to the different probe tests. However, overall, this first empirical study of sequence discrimination on non-human great apes supports the idea that non-human animals, including the closest relatives to humans, lack a memory for stimulus sequences. This may be an ability that sets humans apart from other animals and could be one reason behind the origin of human culture.

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Song recognition memory in juvenile zebra finches: Effects of varying the number of presentations of heterospecific and conspecific songs

Cited by 7 publications

References 25 publications

Begging calls support offspring individual identity and recognition by zebra finch parents

Begging calls support offspring individual identity and recognition by zebra finch parents

Sequence representation as an early step in the evolution of language

A test of memory for stimulus sequences in great apes

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