Zebra Finches Recognize the Calls of Over 40 Fellow Finches

[Judi Lynn]

ABOVE: Zebra finches are highly social, living in colonies of more than 100 birds. Their gregariousness may be one reason they are able to recognize dozens of individuals.
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Their ability to distinguish between individuals is strong evidence for fast mapping, a learning tool generally thought to belong only to

Amanda Heidt
Nov 13, 2020

Fast mapping, the ability to rapidly learn an association between two things after very little exposure, is a key tool responsible for the vast repertoire of human language. It’s the reason we can recognize voices from another room and why newborns prefer to listen to their mothers read them The Cat in the Hat over other women. While fast mapping is generally thought of as a human ability, zebra finches can also distinguish dozens of other finches’ vocalizations, doing so with very little exposure and retaining those memories for at least a month, researchers report today (November 13) in Science Advances.

“The reason that this study is groundbreaking is because zebra finches are the very first vocally learning species aside from ourselves with any evidence that fast mapping takes place,” Samantha Carouso-Peck, a behavioral neuroscientist at Cornell University who researches social influences on vocal learning in zebra finches but was not involved in the current work, tells The Scientist.

Prior to the new study, evidence of fast mapping in nonhumans had been suggested for only a single nonhuman animal: Rico the border collie. Rico is capable of distinguishing the name of more than 200 individual objects and can infer the meaning of a new word after hearing it only once. Whether this is truly evidence of fast mapping, however, has been debated among scientists who believe that only species capable of language, specifically humans, can be said to truly fast map.

To test zebra finches’ ability to recognize individual calls, and the number of exposures they need to do so, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, designed a five-day “learning ladder.” Birds were initially trained on a small set of call data that became increasingly larger over several days.

More:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/zebra-finches-recognize-the-calls-of-over-40-fellow-finches-68157

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