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 I’ve been thinking about our discussion of birds and how they learn their songs.  In class, we identified two components of the learning process: first, the bird hears the adult song of its species, then the bird goes through a plastic song stage where it “practices” the song until it crystallizes.  We decided not to try and get into the details of the role social interactions play in learning birdsong, but I have been thinking about a few studies I’ve read on the subject and I’m interested in how their observations fit our model of behavior.

 More details about the methodology of these experiments can be found here:

http://faculty.washington.edu/beecher/B&B-CDPS2004.pdf

To summarize, researchers looked used several methods to try and teach young birds their species-specific song.  One way was by letting the young birds hear the song directly from an adult bird in the same room.  Another was to isolate the young birds from any other birds and to play a recording of the song on speakers.  Another was to involve a “virtual tutor,” a machine that would only play the recording of the song if the young birds interacted with it in some way. They found that birds that learn their song directly from the adult will usually crystallize the characteristic adult song, while birds that learned from the recording often crystallized a non-characteristic song or remained in their plastic song stage for a much longer time.  The birds learning by virtual tutor, however, were more likely to crystallize the characteristic song than birds learning from a tape, but less likely than birds learning from adults.  This suggests that interaction between individuals is highly important to the learning process, but doesn’t directly fit our auditory template & trial and error model from class.  I suppose it would fit our model if we expanded the template idea so that the template is not only an auditory one, but also includes social cues as well.  This, however, doesn’t really account for the intermediate song learning showed by birds taught by virtual tutor. This leads me to wonder if feedback loops like this are all-or-nothing deals or if there is some sort of intermediate response and if so, what other examples are there?