Abstract
The warble song of budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) is composed of a large number of elements uttered in streams lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes without obvious repetition of particular patterns. Previous work showed that warble elements can be classified into eight acoustic categories for which budgerigars have corresponding perceptual categories. Here, we analyzed long sequences of natural warble to determine the proportion of these categories in warble as well as any sequential patterns of these categories in warble. Results showed that elements were not randomly arranged and that warble has at least a fifth-order Markovian structure. This suggests that budgerigars may have a motor control of approximately five elements during the production of warble. Investigations of the budgerigars’ ability to perceive warble sequences of various lengths showed convergent evidence that budgerigars are able to master a novel sequence between four and seven elements in length. In other words, budgerigars may have an attention span of about five elements which may be a limit of their capacity of neural processing. Through gradual training with chunking (about five elements), birds are able to learn sequences up to 50 elements. [Work supported by NIH/NIDCD R01DC000198 to R.J.D.]
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