Auditory-visual stimulus airing enhances perceptual learning in a songbird

In many oscine birds, song learning is affected by social variables, for ex ample the behaviour of a tutor. This implies that both auditory and visual perceptual systems should be involved in the acquisition process. To examin e whether and how particular visual stimuli can affect song acquisition, we tested the impact of a tutoring;design in which the presentation of audito ry stimuli (i.e. species-specific master songs) was paired with a well-defi ned nonauditory stimulus (i.e. stroboscope light flashes: Strobe regime). T he subjects were male hand-reared nightingales, Luscinia megarhynchos. For controls, males were exposed to tutoring without a light stimulus (Control regime). The males' singing recorded 9 months later showed that the Strobe regime had enhanced the acquisition of song patterns. During this treatment birds had acquired more songs than during the Control regime; the observed increase in repertoire size was from 20 to 30% in most cases. Furthermore, the copy quality of imitations acquired during the Strobe regime was bette r than that of imitations developed from the Control regime, and this was d ue to a significant increase in the number of 'perfect' song copies. We con clude that these effects were mediated by an intrinsic component (e.g. atte ntion or arousal) which specifically responded to the Strobe regime. Our fi ndings also show that;mechanisms of song learning are well prepared to proc ess information from cross-modal perception Thus, more detailed enquiries i nto stimulus complexes that are usually referred to as social variables are promising. (C) 1999 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.