ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Mechanisms underlying the social enhancement of vocal learning in songbirds.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 90 papers.
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Who cites it
90 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vocal and social impairments in songbirds embryonically exposed to an autism risk factor.iScience · 2026Article
- Temporal organization of song modulates vocal learning.iScience · 2025Article
- Prenatal Valproic Acid Exposure Affects Song Learning in Zebra Finches: A Potential Model for Vocal Development in Autism.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- The Amygdala Regulates Social Motivation for Selective Vocal Imitation in Zebra Finches.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Maternal behavior influences vocal practice and learning processes in the greater sac-winged bat.eLife · 2025Article
- An automatic sustained attention prediction (ASAP) method for infants and toddlers using wearable device signals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Delta opioid receptors affect acoustic features of song during vocal learning in zebra finches.BMC neuroscience · 2025Article
- Perineuronal nets in motor circuitry regulate the performance of learned vocalizations in songbirds.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Monkeys can identify pictures from words.PloS one · 2025Article
- Article
- Neural mechanism of dopamine modulating singing related behavior in songbirds: an updated review.PeerJ · 2025Review
- Social context affects sequence modification learning in birdsong.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The songbird connectome (OSCINE-NET.ORG): structure-function organization beyond the canonical vocal control network.BMC neuroscience · 2024Article
- Article
- A longitudinal investigation of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech from 6 to 18 months.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Social and auditory experience shapes forebrain responsiveness in zebra finches before the sensitive period of vocal learning.The Journal of experimental biology · 2024Article
- Female calls promote song learning in male juvenile zebra finches.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Unsupervised discovery of family specific vocal usage in the Mongolian gerbil.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Expansion of learning capacity elicited by interspecific hybridization.Science advances · 2024Article
- Birds and babies: Ontogeny of vocal learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
30 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Social processes profoundly influence speech and language acquisition. Despite the importance of social influences, little is known about how social interactions modulate vocal learning. Like humans, songbirds learn their vocalizations during development, and they provide an excellent opportunity to reveal mechanisms of social influences on vocal learning. Using yoked experimental designs, we demonstrate that social interactions with adult tutors for as little as 1 d significantly enhanced vocal learning. Social influences on attention to song seemed central to the social enhancement of learning because socially tutored birds were more attentive to the tutor's songs than passively tutored birds, and because variation in attentiveness and in the social modulation of attention significantly predicted variation in vocal learning. Attention to song was influenced by both the nature and amount of tutor song: Pupils paid more attention to songs that tutors directed at them and to tutors that produced fewer songs. Tutors altered their song structure when directing songs at pupils in a manner that resembled how humans alter their vocalizations when speaking to infants, that was distinct from how tutors changed their songs when singing to females, and that could influence attention and learning. Furthermore, social interactions that rapidly enhanced learning increased the activity of noradrenergic and dopaminergic midbrain neurons. These data highlight striking parallels between humans and songbirds in the social modulation of vocal learning and suggest that social influences on attention and midbrain circuitry could represent shared mechanisms underlying the social modulation of vocal learning.
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