Mechanisms of auditory temporal pattern recognition

Songbirds have long served as productive models for the neurobiological basis of vocal learning and production. Birdsong research holds similar promise in understanding the perceptual processing of complex acoustic communication signals. I will review recent advances in understanding the behavioral and neural basis of song recognition in a species of song bird, European starlings. The talk will focus on auditory object recognition, and rule learning in the context of temporal pattern recognition. From these studies, I will argue that the starling song recognition system offers an excellent model for understanding the biological basis of some language-relevant forms of pattern rule processing.