Social communication in songbirds - telemetric recording of vocal behavior and underlying neural activity

Songbirds use vocalizations to communicate with conspecifics. I am investigating how this behavior supports large-scale social processes, and how it is controlled by the bird’s brain.

To record vocal and neural activity from several individuals in a social group simultaneously, I exploit “on-bird” radio-telemetric transmission technology. This technique allows to unambiguously assign each vocalization to the bird it was emitted from while preserving the precise temporal relationship between vocal and neural activity of one bird, and between vocalizations of different birds.

In my talk, I will present two projects, which aim to uncover 1) a potential function of vocal communication for interindividual spatial coordination during collective movements and 2) the neural mechanisms of duet singing.