A neural circuit for vocal production responds to viscerosensory input in the songbird.

Motor performance is monitored continuously by specialized brain circuits and used adaptively to modify behavior on a moment-to-moment basis and over longer time periods. During vocal behaviors, such as singing in songbirds, internal evaluation of motor performance relies on sensory input from the auditory and vocal-respiratory systems. Sensory input from the auditory system to the motor system, often referred to as auditory feedback, has been well studied in singing zebra finches (), but little is known about how and where nonauditory sensory feedback is evaluated.

Female signal jamming in a socially monogamous brood parasite.

Acoustic signalling is vital to courtship in many animals, yet the role of female vocalizations is understudied. Here, we combine observational and experimental methods to assess the courtship function of the female chatter call in brown-headed cowbirds, . While the chatter call is likely multifunctional, it is frequently used in social interactions and overlapping duets with males during the breeding season.

3D Bird Reconstruction: a Dataset, Model, and Shape Recovery from a Single View.

Automated capture of animal pose is transforming how we study neuroscience and social behavior. Movements carry important social cues, but current methods are not able to robustly estimate pose and shape of animals, particularly for social animals such as birds, which are often occluded by each other and objects in the environment. To address this problem, we first introduce a model and multi-view optimization approach, which we use to capture the unique shape and pose space displayed by live birds.

Female Songbirds: The unsung drivers of courtship behavior and its neural substrates.

Songbirds hold a prominent role in the fields of neurobiology, evolution, and social behavior. Many of these fields have assumed that females lacked the ability to produce song and have therefore treated song as a male-specific behavior. Consequently, much of our understanding regarding the evolution and neural control of song behavior has been driven by these assumptions.

Population-based analysis of cholesteryl ester transfer protein identifies association between I405V and cognitive decline: the Cache County Study.

Cholesterol has been implicated in the pathogenesis of late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) and the cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) is critical to cholesterol regulation within the cell, making CETP an Alzheimer's disease candidate gene. Several studies have suggested that CETP I405V (rs5882) is associated with cognitive function and LOAD risk, but findings vary and most studies have been conducted using relatively small numbers of samples. To test whether this variant is involved in cognitive function and LOAD progression, we genotyped 4486 subjects with up to 12 years of longitudinal cognitive assessment.

Assessment of TREM2 rs75932628 association with Alzheimer's disease in a population-based sample: the Cache County Study.

Recent studies have identified the rs75932628 (R47H) variant in TREM2 as an Alzheimer's disease risk factor with estimated odds ratio ranging from 2.9 to 5.1.