Neural mechanisms of social communication and perception

Our work focuses on understanding how the perception of communication sounds is accomplished in the brain. In songbirds, we study how the brain codes vocalizations at successive neural processing stages, and how that neural coding is related to experience, sensory system design, and species evolution. Songbirds are particularly interesting because they learn to recognize, respond to and produce the complex songs of other birds They use their songs to communicate socially, in the contexts of mating and self advertisement. This makes them useful systems for understanding how complex sensory signals are encoding and decoded by the brain and how that process results in social communication. The lab currently has four directions that address how the brain functions during song processing/perception.