NIH R01 · 2025
PROJECT SUMMARY: The ability to imitate others is a hallmark of human cognition and culture, and underlie many aspects of our remarkable ability for thought and language. Songbirds have been established as a powerful model system through decades of research, allowing for a mechanistic understanding of how neural circuit dynamics control the learning and production of complex sequential behaviors. Songbirds acquire their songs through an imitation process reminiscent of human speech acquisition using a well-delineated set of brain regions. By listening to their parents (or tutor sing), young birds form an auditory memory—a template. By comparing their own highly variable babbling…
From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.