Conspecific song preference

Researchers studying the swamp sparrow (Melospiza georgiana) have demonstrated that young birds are born with this ability, because juvenile males raised in acoustic isolation and tutored with artificial recordings choose to learn only songs that contain their own species' syllables.

[3] Tight spectral-temporal tuning in the auditory pathway provides the central nervous system of songbirds with the ability to discriminate between conspecific and heterospecific songs.

Tuning characteristics of auditory neurons have been best characterized in zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), canary (Serinus canaria), European starling (Sturnus vulgaris) and Western barn owl (Tyto alba).

[4] Female Canaries lost the ability to discriminate between conspecific and heterospecific song after bilateral lesions to the high vocal center HVC, a nucleus that sits at the apex of both pathways.

Most importantly, gene expression studies have demonstrated that, as a broad unit, neurons in the AFP and SMP show increased activation when a bird is singing, but not when it is simply listening to song.

[14][15] Species-specific differences in cSlo isoforms of hair cell membranes may therefore play a role in the discrimination of conspecific and heterospecific notes in songbirds.

[16] Neurons in the nucleus ovoidalis (Ov) have receptive fields that are tuned to respond to the specific combination of spectral and temporal features present in syllables of conspecific song.

As in nucleus ovoidalis, the spectral-temporal filter properties of Field L and CM neurons are a function of the particular ion channels and receptor proteins driving their synaptic dynamics.

The complex and sophisticated tuning of these higher order processing centers for conspecific sounds may rely on the integrated inputs from the entire ascending auditory pathway, from the hair cells through the thalamus and forebrain, but this challenging synthetic question remains to be investigated.