RESEARCH

Humans are excellent vocal learners. Infants learn to produce complex vocal patterns of their native language from their parents. Research in our laboratory focuses on the question of how animals learn to produce their complex vocalizations from other individuals during a critical period of development, and more broadly, how experience during early life shapes the functioning of the nervous system and individuals’ perception and behavior. To address these questions we mainly study passerine songbirds such as the zebra finch. Songbirds are one of the few animals that show vocal learning like humans, and thus they are a great and unique model system for studying the neural substrates of vocal learning, as well as developmental learning of complex motor skills. Songbirds are also recognized as a powerful model system for studying the function of basal ganglia circuits in reinforcement (trial-and-error) learning, because they are thought to develop their vocal patterns in a trial-and-error process using a specialized basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuit, the anterior forebrain pathway (see the figure).

Our lab plans to focus on the following research topics.

1. Understanding how songbirds regulate their vocal patterns using the basal ganglia-thalamo cortical circuit and the auditory feedback.
2. Understanding how young songbirds develop their song by imitating their tutor, and how such learning ability declines with age.
3. Investigating how the studies of songbirds will contribute to our understanding of the neural substrates underlying human speech learning and basal ganglia-related motor control and disorders, and how such understanding might be harnessed to ultimately benefit humans.