The evolution and development of complex, learned motor skills are thought to be closely associated with other locomotor movement and cognitive functions. However, it remains largely unknown how ...

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 ...

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Only a handful of social animals -- songbirds, some marine mammals, some bats and humans -- learn to actively style their vocal communications. Babies, for instance, start by babbling, their first ...

Despite extensive research on avian vocal learning, we still lack a general understanding of how and when this ability evolved in birds. As the closest living relatives of the earliest Passeriformes, ...