Real Life Mockingjays: How Songbirds Learn New Songs

Mockingjays Picture Ever wonder how a songbird learns to sing? Or how they learn to sing new songs? Scientists uncover the complex strategy method of how songbirds learn new songs. Surprisingly, researchers found that the method resembles similar learning strategies employed by computer scientists.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, scientists studied Zebra finches ability to learn a new song, which is similar to the ability of a child to learn a new language. The process of learning a new song is extremely complex, but the Zebra finches have learned a new strategy that helps them tackle the project step by step. First the birds take the song syllables they already know and adapting them to the new syllables. Since this process leads to the syllables getting mixed up, the finches use the next phase to arrange the newly learned syllables into the correct order.

Scientists began the study by observing a group of young birds that less than one month old. Every day, researchers would broad cast a song to the birds and the birds would then learn that song. After a month, the researchers would change the song and the birds would adapt to learn the new one. The songs were recorded and then analyzed by a computer to evaluate them syllable by syllable. Interestingly this method is employed but computer linguistics in order to compare documents. Algorithms compare written documents considering their words in context regardless of the order. Today, computer scientists employ these techniques that songbirds naturally evolved years ago. Researchers hope these studies will not only help us to understand a human’s ability to learn new languages, but also to consider how we can apply these types of techniques in unique and innovative ways.

Songbirds work around computational complexity by learning song vocabulary independently of sequence (November 2017)

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