How sleep affects the developmental learning of bird song

Deregnaucourt, S., Mitra, P. P., Feher, O., Pytte, C., Tchernichovski, O. (February 2005) How sleep affects the developmental learning of bird song. Nature, 433 (7027). pp. 710-716. ISSN 0028-0836

URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15716944
DOI: 10.1038/nature03275

Abstract

Sleep affects learning and development in humans and other animals, but the role of sleep in developmental learning has never been examined. Here we show the effects of night-sleep on song development in the zebra finch by recording and analysing the entire song ontogeny. During periods of rapid learning we observed a pronounced deterioration in song structure after night-sleep. The song regained structure after intense morning singing. Daily improvement in similarity to the tutored song occurred during the late phase of this morning recovery; little further improvement occurred thereafter. Furthermore, birds that showed stronger post-sleep deterioration during development achieved a better final imitation. The effect diminished with age. Our experiments showed that these oscillations were not a result of sleep inertia or lack of practice, indicating the possible involvement of an active process, perhaps neural song-replay during sleep. We suggest that these oscillations correspond to competing demands of plasticity and consolidation during learning, creating repeated opportunities to reshape previously learned motor skills.

Item Type: Paper
Uncontrolled Keywords: ZEBRA FINCH zebra finch MEMORY CONSOLIDATION memory consolidation ANTERIOR FOREBRAIN anterior forebrain AUDITORY-FEEDBACK auditory feedback VOCAL IMITATION vocal imitation AGE age SONGBIRDS songbirds DYNAMICS dynamics LANGUAGE NEURONS
Subjects: organism description > animal behavior > REM sleep
organism description > animal behavior
organism description > animal behavior > learning
organism description > animal behavior > memory
organism description > animal behavior > song
organism description > animal > bird > Zebra Finch
CSHL Authors:
Communities: CSHL labs > Mitra lab
Depositing User: CSHL Librarian
Date: February 2005
Date Deposited: 04 Apr 2012 17:06
Last Modified: 01 Mar 2013 19:26
Related URLs:
URI: https://repository.cshl.edu/id/eprint/25828

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