Within-species differences in vocal production learning in a songbird are associated with differences in flexible rhythm pattern perception

Humans readily recognize a familiar rhythmic pattern, such as isochrony (equal timing between events) across a wide range of rates. This ability reflects a facility with perceiving the relative timing of events, not just absolute interval durations. Several lines of evidence suggest that this ability is supported by precise temporal predictions that arise from forebrain auditory-motor interactions. We have shown previously that male zebra finches, which possess specialized auditory-motor networks and communicate with rhythmically patterned sequences, share our ability to recognize isochrony independent of rate. To test the hypothesis that flexible rhythm pattern perception is linked to vocal learning, we ask whether female zebra finches, which do not learn to sing, can also recognize global temporal patterns. We find that non-singing females can flexibly recognize isochrony but perform slightly worse than males on average. These findings are consistent with recent work showing that while females have reduced forebrain song regions, the overall network connectivity of vocal premotor regions is similar to that in males and supports predictions of upcoming events. Comparative studies of male and female songbirds thus offer an opportunity to study how individual differences in auditory-motor connectivity influence perception of relative timing, a hallmark of human music perception. Media summary When we recognize a song that’s played faster or slower than usual, we are detecting timing relations between sounds, not just absolute durations. This ability relies on auditory-motor interactions in the brain. Auditory-motor processing is more developed in animals that learn their vocalizations so we hypothesize that such animals are advantaged in recognizing a rhythmic pattern at different rates. We test this idea in a songbird where only males learn to sing, and find males are slightly better than females at rhythmic pattern recognition. Thus, songbirds are ideal for investigating individual differences in rhythm pattern perception and underlying brain mechanisms.