Fig. 3: Correlated female calls to juvenile practice improve song learning.
From: Female calls promote song learning in male juvenile zebra finches
A Experimental setup with two microphones – box microphone (purple) and backpack microphone (orange). B Example spectrograms of a simultaneous recording from the box microphone and the backpack microphone during song practice. Song (purple) and female calls (orange) were automatically detected using the Deep Audio Segmenter (DAS)46. C Ratio of female calls occurring during juvenile song practice relative to the duration of the song production (see “Methods” section) for each individual juvenile 1–5 (n = 5 juveniles, n = 4 different females, linear regression model, juvenile 1: p = 0.0142, juvenile 2: p = 0.0168, juvenile 3: p = 0.0329, juvenile 4: p = 0.785, juvenile 5: p = 0.598). Purple circles represent the call rate during songs. Black line indicates the linear correlation (juvenile 1: R2 = 0.435, F = 8.46, juvenile 2: R2 = 0.325, F = 7.23, juvenile 3: R2 = 0.38, F = 6.12, juvenile 4: R2 = 0.005, F = 0.008, juvenile 5: R2 = 0.02, F = 0.29), dotted line shows confidence intervals of calculated correlation. Numbers in brackets indicate the mean song similarity score to the tutor song on the last day of practice. Asterisk marks significant difference (p < 0.05); n.s. = not significant. D Song similarity (mean value in purple, error bars represent standard error of the mean, n = 10 song motifs per juvenile) at day 91 (juvenile 1 and 4) or day 92 (juvenile 2, 3, and 5) post-hatch for all five juveniles. Black line indicates the song similarity of untutored birds, dashed lines indicate the upper bound of the 95% confidence interval calculated from the song similarity of untutored birds. E Syllable rate of the song of the individual juveniles (n = 5 birds). Error bars represent the standard error of the mean. Syllable rate of the tutor song playback is indicated with the blue line. F (Top panel) Spectrogram of the tutor song. (Bottom three panels) Spectrogram of the learned song of juveniles 1–5. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.
