Gess Austen, Schneider David M, Vyas Akshat, Woolley Sarah M N
Department of Biology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y., 10016, USA.
Anim Behav. 2011 Aug 1;82(2):285-293. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.05.003.
Laboratory training and testing of auditory recognition skills in animals is important for understanding animal communication systems that depend on auditory cues. Songbirds are commonly studied because of their exceptional ability to learn complex vocalizations. In recent years, mounting interest in the perceptual abilities of songbirds has increased the demand for laboratory behavioural training and testing paradigms. Here, we describe and demonstrate the success of a method for auditory discrimination experiments, including all the necessary hardware, training procedures and freely-available, versatile software. The system can run several behavioural training and testing paradigms, including operant (go-nogo, stimulus preference, and two-alternative forced choice) and classical conditioning tasks. The software and some hardware components can be used with any laboratory animal that learns and responds to sensory cues. The peripheral hardware and training procedures are designed for use with songbirds and auditory stimuli. Using the go-nogo paradigm of the training system, we show that adult zebra finches learn to recognize and correctly classify individual female calls and male songs. We also show that learning the task generalizes to new stimulus classes; birds that learned the task with calls subsequently learned to recognize songs faster than did birds that learned the task and songs at the same time.
对动物听觉识别技能进行实验室训练和测试，对于理解依赖听觉线索的动物交流系统至关重要。鸣禽因其学习复杂发声的非凡能力而常被研究。近年来，对鸣禽感知能力的兴趣日益浓厚，这增加了对实验室行为训练和测试范式的需求。在此，我们描述并展示了一种听觉辨别实验方法的成功之处，包括所有必要的硬件、训练程序以及免费可用的通用软件。该系统可以运行多种行为训练和测试范式，包括操作性（是/否、刺激偏好和二选一强制选择）和经典条件任务。该软件和一些硬件组件可用于任何能学习并对感官线索做出反应的实验动物。外围硬件和训练程序专为鸣禽和听觉刺激而设计。使用训练系统的是/否范式，我们表明成年斑胸草雀学会了识别并正确分类单个雌鸟鸣叫声和雄鸟鸣唱。我们还表明，学习该任务能推广到新的刺激类别；用叫声学习该任务的鸟类随后比同时学习该任务和鸣唱的鸟类更快学会识别鸣唱。
