December Monthly Meeting – Ivy Creek: Growing up in a crowd: How the social environment shapes auditory processing in the Australian Zebra Finch

Presenter: Dan Meliza, University of Virginia

The Australian Zebra Finch (Taeniopygia castanotis) is a highly social songbird that lives in arid climates where food and water are scarce and unreliable. Zebra finches breed opportunistically, building nesting colonies in which chicks are exposed to the vocalizations of multiple conspecifics. Dan Meliza and his lab at the University of Virginia study how this social-acoustical complexity contributes to neural development in the avian homolog of the auditory cortex and how neural plasticity supports the ability of adult birds to communicate effectively in the noisy “cocktail-party” of a flock. In this talk, Dan will describe how his team creates virtual acoustical environments in the lab and how these manipulations affect behavioral perception and neural circuit development.