Approaches to the mechanisms of song memorization and singing provide evidence for a procedural memory

Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciências

Henrike Hultsch¹  Dietmar Todt¹ 

[1] ,Free University of Berlin Institute of Biology Department of Behavioural BiologyBerlin,Germany

关键词: song learning;    procedural memory;    song sequencing;    short-term memory;    chunking;    aprendizagem do canto;    memória procedural;    seqüenciamento do canto;    memória de curto prazo;    chunking;   

DOI  :  10.1590/S0001-37652004000200005

来源: SciELO

【 摘 要 】

There is growing evidence that, during song learning, birds do not only acquire 'what to sing' (the inventory of behavior), but also 'how to sing' (the singing program), including order-features of song sequencing. Common Nightingales Luscinia megarhynchos acquire such serial information by segmenting long strings of heard songs into smaller subsets or packages, by a process reminiscent of the chunking of information as a coding mechanism in short term memory. Here we report three tutoring experiments on nightingales that examined whether such 'chunking' was susceptible to experimental cueing. The experiments tested whether (1) 'temporal phrasing' (silent intersong intervals spaced out at particular positions of a tutored string), or (2) 'stimulus novelty' (groups of novel song-types added to a basic string), or (3) 'pattern similarity' in the phonetic structure of songs (here: sharing of song initials) would induce package boundaries (or chunking) at the manipulated sequential positions. The results revealed cueing effects in experiments (1) and (2) but not in experiment (3). The finding that birds used temporal variables as cues for chunking does not require the assumption that package formation is a cognitive strategy. Rather, it points towards a mechanism of procedural memory operating in the song acquisition of birds.

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