Dopamine neurons encode performance error in singing birds

Birds of a feather sing together How do birds know that a song that they hear is from a member of their own species, and how do they learn their songs in the first place? Araki et al. identified two types of brain cells involved in how finches learn their songs (see the Perspective by Tchernichovski and Lipkind). When zebra finches were raised by Bengalese finch foster parents, they learned a song whose morphology resembled that of their foster father. However, the temporal structure remained zebra finch–specific, suggesting that it is innate. Gadagkar et al. recorded activity in specific dopamine neurons in singing zebra finches while controlling perceived song quality with distorted auditory feedback. This distorted feedback represented worse performance than predicted and resulted in negative prediction errors. These findings suggest again that finches have an innate internal goal for their learned songs. Science , this issue p. 1282 , p. 1234 ; see also p. 1278