Operant test (VIDEO)
Caption
Zebra finches have a repertoire of about a dozen call-types. UC Berkeley researchers designed an ‘operant’ task to test their classification of these vocalizations. Here, a female zebra finch is performing the classification task. While the bird interrupts the playback of vocalizations that do not belong to the target song category, she correctly refrains from interrupting the playback of the target song and is given a seed reward. During each day of the experiment, zebra finches were asked to classify a different call-type from their repertoire.
Credit
Julie Elie/UC Berkeley
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none
License
Original content