Richard Mooney, Neurobiology

Our interest in sensitive period regulation addresses a fundamental problem in developmental neurobiology. As with human language acquisition, birdsong is learned during a sensitive period that is restricted to juvenile stages of life and requires the young bird to hear and memorize the song of another bird (usually that of its own species). Behavioral evidence shows that birds will become refractory to acquiring song models after the second month of life, and will retain memories (evinced by their capacity to vocally re-express them) acquired during this sensitive period for many years, or even throughout life. A likely scenario is one where the central circuits for singing and song learning are permanently altered in their structure and function by this early auditory experience.

This research has taken three major directions in our lab, including behavioral analysis of song development, in vivo, and in vitro intracellular electrophysiological characterization of circuits serving song learning, and the elucidation of the cellular neuroanatomy of these circuits. Our overarching goal is to understand the manner in which the nervous system of the bird encodes song in both the auditory and motor domains, and how these representations interact to mediate vocal learning.