Abstract
Songbirds are renowned for their acoustically elaborate songs. However, it is unclear whether songbirds can cognitively control their vocal output. Here, we show that crows, songbirds of the corvid family, can be trained to exert control over their vocalizations. In a detection task, three male carrion crows rapidly learned to emit vocalizations in response to a visual cue with no inherent meaning (go trials) and to withhold vocalizations in response to another cue (catch trials). Two of these crows were then trained on a go/nogo task, with the cue colors reversed, in addition to being rewarded for withholding vocalizations to yet another cue (nogo trials). Vocalizations in response to the detection of the go cue were temporally precise and highly reliable in all three crows. Crows also quickly learned to withhold vocal output in nogo trials, showing that vocalizations were not produced by an anticipation of a food reward in correct trials. The results demonstrate that corvids can volitionally control the release and onset of their vocalizations, suggesting that songbird vocalizations are under cognitive control and can be decoupled from affective states.
Highlights
Songbird vocalizations are elaborate and complex communicative signals whose behavioral and neuronal foundations have been extensively studied [1,2,3]
Three carrion crows were trained to vocalize in response to the presentation of a cue with no inherent meaning and to refrain from vocalizing when another cue was presented
Our results demonstrate that carrion crows can volitionally control vocal output in a goaldirected manner
Summary
Songbird vocalizations are elaborate and complex communicative signals whose behavioral and neuronal foundations have been extensively studied [1,2,3]. In contrast to the communicative signals of most animal taxa, songbirds’ vocalizations are learned by imitation [5,6,7] and show a degree of flexibility [8] in onset [9], social context [10,11], and structure [12,13]. This flexibility potentially indicates that songbird vocalizations are under volitional control. We present a direct test of the conjecture that songbirds might volitionally control their vocalization in the sense that they can be emitted or inhibited at will, as opposed to being involuntary responses to food, mates, or predators and being largely dependent on affective states
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