neuroscience and behavior in parrots and songbirds
Simons junior fellow and post-doc at NYU Langone studying vocal communication, PhD MIT brain and cognitive sciences
Andrew Bahle
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I think progress here requires a few things: 1) better conceptual clarity across the board and 2) large scale lab studies where we can monitor vocalizations and social interactions over months/yrs. This will allow for much more fine grained tests of our theories of animal communication.
Our piece on language-like properties in animal vocal behavior is available today. Check it out! This is an incredibly difficult and thorny topic which is nonetheless of supreme importance and interest imco (in my current opinion)
Is there ‘syntax’ in animal vocalizations? Maybe/it depends what you mean. In any case there sure are some complex long timescale dependencies that look rule-like! The bird song people are making a lot of progress on understanding how this structure arises.
Andrew Bahle
They are several distinctive statistical ‘laws’ which are present in human languages. Are these present in animals? Yes! but interpreting these findings however is not trivial. I think Inbal’s idea that learnability plays a key role may be in the right track.
We discuss a few features of language which may have analogs in animals vocalizations: statistical laws (zipf+), syntax (or at least complex sequencing) and reference and meaning (the ghosts of many dead philosophers haunt this one, but that’s because it so important!)
Finally the trickiest and the most interesting (again imco). Do animals mean things when they ‘talk’? I would say the answer is certainly yes. The question is how sophisticated are these meanings, and how widespread is this ability. Unassailable evidence is not easy to come by.
Two brain circuits.
Same learning problem.
Shared learning outcomes.
Different dynamical implementations.
Our work shows that learning is not a single canonical solution but can emerge through distinct population dynamics shaped by circuit architecture.
Excited to share our latest preprint! 🧵1/12
Andrew Bahle
Andrew Bahle
Andrew Bahle
Andrew Bahle
Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain?
Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics
Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS
This Friday at McGill University, @loganjames.bsky.social and Maddie Cusimano will join researchers exploring computational approaches to animal communication at the symposium “Computational and Mechanistic Analyses of Communicative Interactions.”
Register at: logansjames.github.io/events.html
Combining a computational framework and optogenetic and chemogenetic manipulations within and downstream of the cortico-basal ganglia circuit identifies the specific cortico-basal ganglia synapse...
