WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2019
3:00 pm
Room 5209 at The Graduate Center, CUNY

Speaker:
Dina Lipkind, York College

How does one learn a complex motor skill with many constituent parts, such as a song, a dance, a language, or a sports game? In both humans and animals, learning complex skills seems to rely on a gradual approximation of an internal representation of the desired behavior, rather than on external rewards or punishments. However, finding a way to adjust one’s own behavior to match a complex internal goal is a computationally daunting task; it may be more efficient not to treat the entire behavior as a single goal, but instead to divide it into sub-goals and use distinct subroutines to attain each. We find that young Zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) employ such “divide and conquer” approach to imitate the elaborate songs of adult individuals, employing distinct strategies to learn the vocabulary of syllables in their song, their sequential order, and the syllables’ internal structure. This combination of strategies may be an adaptation enabling efficient learning of a complex behavior within a relatively short developmental time window.