Most vertebrates communicate acoustically, but few, among them humans, dolphins and whales, bats, and three orders of birds, learn this trait. FOXP2 is the first gene linked to human speech and has been the target of positive ...

Movements are necessary to engage the world, but every movement results in sensorimotor ambiguity. Self-movements cause changes to sensory inflow as well as changes in the positions of objects relative to motor effectors ...

Biological systems by default involve complex components with complex relationships. To decipher how biological systems work, we assume that one needs to integrate information over multiple levels of complexity. The songbird ...

Auditory and vocal regulation of gene expression occurs in separate discrete regions of the songbird brain. Here we demonstrate that regulated gene expression also occurs during vocal communication in a parrot, belonging ...

Hummingbirds have developed a wealth of intriguing features, such as backwards flight, ultraviolet vision, extremely high metabolic rates, nocturnal hibernation, high brain-to-body size ratio and a remarkable species-specific ...

MOTIVATION: Although many network inference algorithms have been presented in the bioinformatics literature, no suitable approach has been formulated for evaluating their effectiveness at recovering models of complex biological ...

The high vocal center (HVC) controls song production in songbirds and sends a projection to the robust nucleus of the archistriatum (RA) of the descending vocal pathway. HVC receives new neurons in adulthood. Most of the ...

Learned vocalization, the substrate for human language, is a rare trait. It is found in three distantly related groups of birds-parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds. These three groups contain cerebral vocal nuclei for learned ...

It has become increasingly clear that the standard nomenclature for many telencephalic and related brainstem structures of the avian brain is based on flawed once-held assumptions of homology to mammalian brain structures, ...

Vocal learning, the substrate for human language, is a rare trait found to date in only three distantly related groups of mammals (humans, bats, and cetaceans) and three distantly related groups of birds (parrots, hummingbirds, ...