Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, University of Chicago, 1027 East 57th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60622, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2011 Nov;130(5):3115-23. doi: 10.1121/1.3641420.
Learning to recognize complex sensory signals can change the way they are perceived. European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) recognize other starlings by their song, which consists of a series of complex, stereotyped motifs. Song recognition learning is accompanied by plasticity in secondary auditory areas, suggesting that perceptual learning is involved. Here, to investigate whether perceptual learning can be observed behaviorally, a same-different operant task was used to measure how starlings perceived small differences in motif structure. Birds trained to recognize conspecific songs were better at detecting variations in motifs from the songs they learned, even though this variation was not directly necessary to learn the associative task. Discrimination also improved as the reference stimulus was repeated multiple times. Perception of the much larger differences between different motifs was unaffected by training. These results indicate that sensory representations of motifs are enhanced when starlings learn to recognize songs.
学习识别复杂的感觉信号可以改变它们被感知的方式。欧洲椋鸟通过其歌声来识别其他椋鸟，歌声由一系列复杂的、刻板的主题组成。歌曲识别学习伴随着次级听觉区域的可塑性，表明感知学习是参与其中的。在这里，为了研究是否可以观察到行为上的感知学习，使用了相同-不同操作性任务来测量椋鸟如何感知主题结构中的微小差异。经过训练识别同种鸟类歌曲的鸟类，即使这种变化对于学习联想任务不是直接必要的，它们也能更好地检测到所学习歌曲中主题结构的变化。随着参考刺激重复多次，辨别能力也会提高。对不同主题之间差异大得多的感知不受训练的影响。这些结果表明，当椋鸟学会识别歌曲时，主题的感觉表示会得到增强。
