We are all born completely helpless, with little of the knowledge and skills we will need to survive as adults. Even our ability to communicate is almost entirely learned from our parents or ...

Scientists have identified neurons in the songbird brain that convey the auditory feedback needed to learn a song. Their research lays the foundation for improving human speech, for example, in people ...

Shared learning method: Human infants and zebra finches both develop complex vocalizations through social feedback from caregivers or adult birds. Experiments across species: Three studies—two with ...

Many animal species that live in groups are known to adjust their behavior to strengthen their social bonds or increase their coordination with others around them. For instance, humans and some other ...

The vocalizations of humans, bats, whales, seals and songbirds vastly differ from each other. Humans and birds, for example, are separated by some 300 million years of evolution. But scientists ...

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 ...

The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. Figure 3: Progressive song change in adult mutants. The alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI. The ...

Human speech is often considered one of the traits that sets our species apart. While many animals communicate with sounds, human language relies on a unique combination of anatomy, brain wiring, and ...

For decades, scientists have known that only a few groups of birds—songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds—can learn to produce new sounds. But a new article in The Quarterly Review of Biology, Volume ...

The neuroscientist Erich Jarvis discovered that songbirds' vocal skills and humans' spoken language are both rooted in neural pathways for controlling learned movements. When Erich Jarvis, a ...

In reinforcement learning (RL) agents are typically tasked with maximizing a single objective function such as reward. But it remains poorly understood how agents might pursue distinct objectives at ...