The white-crowned manakin was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae and given the binomial name Parus pipra.

[6] Subsequent molecular phylogenetic studies confirmed that Pipra, as traditionally defined, was polyphyletic and most ornithologists followed Prum and placed the white-crowned manakin in Dixiphia.

[7][8][9] However, in 2016 Guy Kirwan and colleagues showed that Dixiphia was actually a junior synonym of Arundinicola and erected the genus Pseudopipra as a replacement.

[12] In Ecuador, this manakins seems to be largely absent from level-ground terra firme forest, instead preferring hilly terra firme above 250 m. In the Colombian Andes it generally occurs at 600–1,200 m, although at their northernmost extremity, the species has occurred as low as 100 m. The white-crowned manakin is 9–10 cm (3.5–3.9 in) in length.

[13] It is a compact short-tailed bird with a stout hooked bill, dark legs, red eyes and striking male plumage.

Males fly between horizontal perches 3–12 m high and up to 50 m apart with a swooping flight, or, when a female is present, a slow butterfly-like flutter.

An open cup of brownish-yellow (or similarly colored) vegetable fibers, fungal hyphae (Marasmius sp.

: Marasmiaceae), and sometimes fragments of palm fronds, covered on the outside with dead leaves and bound together and to the substrate using spider webs, built 1.0–9.8 m above ground in the horizontal fork of an understory shrub or small tree, up to c. 19 m tall.