23.05.23 - Richard Hahnloser

How do songbirds extract an auditory template from the songs they hear and how do they adjust their immature vocalizations to arrive at a good match of the template? I will present our research in zebra finches aimed at disentangling the developmental song learning strategies. We frame these strategies in the context of intrinsic rewards that birds strive to maximize through their singing. This approach provides predictions about neural mechanisms involving dopaminergic neurons, which are known to respond to reward prediction errors. We highlight surprising parallels between evolutionary old learning strategies in songbirds and modern techniques in computational linguistics.