Reconstructed motor gestures unveil different dialects in Zebra Finch songs

YONATAN SANZ PERL; GABRIEL B. MINDLIN

Congreso; XVIII Congreso anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Neuriociencias; 2013

Songbirds are an ideal animal model for studying the mechanism that are involved in the learning, control and production of a complex behavior.Our group has been developing in the last years mathematical models describing the biomechanics of the avian vocal organ,including the motor gestures that control both the sound source and the vocal upper tract.In this way we reduce the dimensionality in the description of the singing dynamics, giving rise to a description of the behavior in terms of simple motor gestures. In this work we implement this model and apply it songs from birds from different Zebra Finch colonies. We report that many of the features of the reconstructed motor gestures were present in all the colonies. Others ,were present in only one of them,giving rise to different dialects in the Zebra Finch song.In this way, we provide a quantitative tool to address the issue of which of the components needed to achieve this complex behavior present signatures of learning.