ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Sinnott offers a fascinating and suggestive theoretical analysis of some data obtained when redwing blackbirds and cowbirds learned to discriminate among examples of their own conspecific song or among examples of song from an alien species. Human subjects were also included. In general, all species learned to discriminate complete songs equally well, although humans were somewhat faster than the birds in developing the discrimination. However, a second experiment broke songs into syllables and tested for differential discrimination of the syllables. Once again, birds and humans did equally well on the beginning introductory elements of the song, but their discrimination performance differed for terminal elements of the song. Redwings did better on their own song than did cowbirds, but cowbirds did better on their song than did redwings. Humans, once again, perform better than all birds in the final elements. Another experiment showed that all birds could learn to discriminate on the basis of the final elements of song if they were tutored and given practice in doing so—so differences in processing the terminal elements were not due to some inherent lack of perceptual capacity.
