Sarah Woolley:
(Thursday, June 28, 11am)
Vocal communication signals are critical in social interactions across many species. In the zebra finch, a small, gregarious songbird, males produce learned vocal signals (‘songs’) during courtship interactions with females. Female zebra finches do not sing, but use songs to recognize individuals and select mates. Female song preferences are influenced by auditory and social experiences in development as well as adulthood. We still know little, however, about either the role of experience in shaping female preferences or the neural circuits involved in encoding song preferences. I will discuss recent data from my lab investigating the neural mechanisms of female song preferences and mating decisions and how they are modulated by social and auditory experience. The data will highlight the importance of developmental auditory experience and adult mating experience in tuning neural and behavioral responses to song as well as the role of midbrain dopaminergic activity allowing plasticity for these experiential changes through projections to the auditory cortex.
Van Ruijssevelt, L., Chen, Y., von Eugen, K., Hamaide, J., De Groof, G., Verhoye, M., ... & Van der Linden, A. (2018). fMRI reveals a novel region for evaluating acoustic information for mate choice in a female songbird. Current Biology, 28(5), 711-721.
Chen, Y., Clark, O., & Woolley, S. C. (2017). Courtship song preferences in female zebra finches are shaped by developmental auditory experience. Proc. R. Soc. B, 284(1855), 20170054.
During the presentation, you said that the females could form song preferences and that it may be dependent on dopamine. However, it would require more than passive exposure to do so. My reasoning was that, as you said earlier, we know that dopamine is involved in many ways in the plasticity of the brain. You also talked about the norepinephrine for that matter. For human brain, I know that there is also the acetylcholine that is involved in the plasticity, more precisely, in context of sustained attention. Since the female needs more than passive exposure to form song preferences, do you know if there are also other components (beside dopamine and norepinephrine), as acetylcholine, that could be involved in the plasticity of the brain in development of the female bird?
ReplyDeleteAfter your presentation, I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the possible continuity in the biological basis and/or evolution of musicality across species? There are those, like Steven Pinker, who qualifies music as ''auditory cheesecake'' with no biological value for humans.
ReplyDeleteBut by looking at the behaviour of songbirds, it seems like their fitness is in some regards dependant on their musicality, which makes me feel like it would not be ''bad anthropomorphism'' to think possible such a continuity.
The question re the ethical justification of such research was already raised by Jonathan Birch. However, could you please provide some more details by describing a harm-benefit analysis where the harms to the birds are weighed against the benefits for humans? Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI understand that zebra finches don’t go from a partner to another because their relationships are long-term based. I am wondering if in the wild (since the studies were conducted in captivity), the zebra finches would cheat on their ‘long-term partner/mate’. We saw with prairie voles, yesterday, that the females tended to cheat, while males were more tended to stick to one female. I feel like the female zebra finch has the final choice on her mate, since the male is doing the courtship and the female is choosing whether she likes him or not. Would females be more inclined to ‘cheat’?
ReplyDeleteIn response to one of the questions, you (Sarah) mentioned that female birds prefer songs that are not actually perfectly stereotyped but rather contain some degree of variability. This may be a stretch, but I was wondering if this could mean something about the bird's individual personalities being expressed somehow in the way that the birds sing the courtship song. Much like human beings match up or don't match up based on the perception of their partner's personality traits, maybe the variation in the courtship song is not necessaruly a fault but rather expresses some sort of internal personality trait of the male bird that is then picked up and decoded by the female as desireable for her or undesirable based on her internal traits.
ReplyDeleteLes «birdsongs» sont des moyens de communication entre les oiseaux pour prendre des décisions et reconnaître des individus. Chez certaines espèces, dès qu’une femelle se fait courtiser par un mâle, elle devient très sensible à son chant ou à des chants très similaires. Des neurotransmetteurs, comme la dopamine, joue un rôle dans le développement de la relation. D’autres facteurs environnementaux vont venir moduler la relation et sensibiliser la femelle à certains types de chants, comme la présence d’un parent masculin lors de la période de développement de la femelle. J’ai été surpris d’apprendre qu’il n’y avait pas d’effet d’habitation. Je pensais qu’éventuellement, le chant du mâle ne ferait plus effet. Chez les humains, par exemple, les signaux chimiques et hormonaux de l’amour passionnel diminuent avec le temps. Le nombre d’exposition au chant du mâle et non la durée de la relation pourrait-il être un facteur éventuellement responsable d’une séparation ou d’un effet d’habituation?
ReplyDeleteOn pourrait s’attendre à ce que la préférence des femelles pour les “courtship songs” soit quelque chose d’inné. En effet, il fait sens de penser, à l’intérieur du cadre évolutionniste, que les femelles soient attirées par les mâles plus adaptés qui donnent une meilleure “performance”. De ce point de vue, l’environnement social dans lequel le développement a lieu n’aurait que très peu d’importance dans la manière dont les femelles perçoivent les chants mâles. Toutefois, Sarah Woolley nous a montré qu’il n’y avait pas de réelle préférence pour les “courtship songs” pour des femelles qui n’avaient pas entendu de tels chants préalablement dans leur développement (femelles qu’elles nomment des “song-naive females”). Le développement auditif joue donc un rôle très important pour les femelles dans leur préférence des “courtship songs”. J’ai trouvé cela particulièrement intéressant.
ReplyDeleteEn effet, je trouve également intéressant que, contrairement à ce que l’on aurait pu croire, l’appréciation du chant des diamants mandarins (zebra finch) est tributaire de l’expérience passée des femelles. En d’autres mots, que les femelles doivent avoir été exposées au courtship song afin que leur cortex auditif soit modulé, leur permettant de forger leurs préférences par rapport à ce type de chant. De plus, il faut ajouter à ce fait l’importance de l’interaction entre la femelle et le mâle, ce qui influence grandement l’appréciation de la courtship song.
DeleteHow does preference relate to sentience and intelligence - is «preference» a token of sentience ?
ReplyDeletePutting this question for the sake of the evaluation for students, I already asked the question during the Q&A period. I think my question was regarding the evolution or a trend in vocalizations changing with regards to variation in the males. Is there a change in the “typical” vocalization in males, because there is a general, specie-specific call. With variation and female preference, does that change over time, or is it stable through the generations. I already had my answer so no need to answer.
ReplyDeleteMrs Woolley's presentation seemed to me very clear, and was also an interesting complement of the previous one by her colleague Mr Sakata. I was intrigued by a question Dr Harnad addressed to the attention of Mrs Woolley who didn't have an answer: Any comment on the adaptative value of earworms? I don't know if Dr Harnad has himself an answer or a theory about it? I did some research and that's all I've found for now: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-evolutionary-purpose-to-having-a-song-stuck-in-your-head
ReplyDeleteWe have seen that mesencephalon neurons that participate in the secretion of dopamine and norepinephrine are activated by visual and auditory stimuli and promote the learning of new sounds. Social interactions (visual and auditory) thus favor the emission of new sounds. I would like to know if oxytocin plays a particular role in the neural mechanisms of female song preferences and mating decisions.
ReplyDeleteThank you.
Hi Amandine, this article titled "The neurochemistry of music" has something on oxytocin. If you can't access it, just send me an email.
Deletedoi:10.1016/j.tics.2013.02.007
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364661313000491
The other one talks about (singing) mice only, sorry. This one is on zebra finches, oxytocin (or at least something like it hypothesized to be present in those birds) and pair bonding:
Deletehttp://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1750/20122396.short
None of it seems to deal specifically with song preferences (although mating choices... in song birds... kind of seems to imply it, perhaps Sarah could clarify if she has the time), but until then, perhaps it can help you get clearer a picture of what "oxytocin" might be "for" as far as partner's choices in song birds are concerned.
Can a bird separated from its own specie learn a courtship song from another specie of bird, or is it biologically dependant?
ReplyDeleteThank you for the talk. You mentioned that naïve songbirds (who haven’t benn exposed to the father’s song) don’t show preference for courtship songbirds compared to the other birds. Do they tend to discriminate less to choose a mate?
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned that for the males, the basal ganglia is generating noise to accentuate the signing variability in order to explore the bird’s capabilities and practice it.
ReplyDelete- Is there a correlation between the stress level and the amplitude of the noise generated by the basal banglia?
La dopamine est elle nécessaire pour préférer? Y a-t-il d'autres neurotransmetteurs qui jouent ce rôle?
ReplyDelete