The brain is a highly modular structure. To exploit modularity, it is necessary that spiking
activity can propagate from one module to another while preserving the information it …

Most of our motor skills are not innately programmed, but are learned by a combination of
motor exploration and performance evaluation, suggesting that they proceed through a …

A common trend in neuroscience is convergence on selected model systems. Underlying
this approach is an often implicit assumption that mechanisms observed in one species are …

A young male zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) learns to sing by copying the vocalizations
of an older tutor in a process that parallels human speech acquisition. Brain pathways that …

In recent years, there has been a great deal of progress toward understanding the role of the
striatum and dopamine in action selection. The advent of new animal models and the …

Dopamine has been implicated in the modulation of diverse forms of behavioral plasticity,
including appetitive learning and addiction. An important challenge is to understand how …

Large, chronically implanted arrays of microelectrodes are an increasingly common tool for
recording from primate cortex and can provide extracellular recordings from many (order of …

Speech has long been thought of as a uniquely defining characteristic of humans. Yet song
birds, like humans, communicate using learned signals (song, speech) that are acquired …

Songbirds use a complex network of discrete brain areas and connecting fiber tracts to sing
their song, but our knowledge of this circuitry may be incomplete. The forebrain area,“caudal …

Understanding the biological foundations of language is vital to gaining insight into how the
capacity for language may have evolved in humans. Animal models can be exploited to …