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Faculty Member associated with: Otilia Menyhart, Bernard A. Tarr Keywords: Bird Song (5), Cognitive Neuroscience (14), Development (13), Finch (4), Hippocampus (4), Immediate early genes (5), Learning and memory (11), Neuroethology (7) I'm interested in neurobiology of learning and memory. My lab studies this using song learning in songbirds, and spatial learning in food-caching birds. Recent findings include the following: 1) Female zebra finches require experience with song during development in order to select normal over poor (isolate) conspecific song. Such birds also have fewer synapses in a an auditory perceptual brain area (Lauay et al., 2004,2005) 2) Species with elaborate song repertoires have larger song production brain areas than those with smaller repertoires (Moore et al., in prep.) 3)Chickadees injected in the hippocampus with an NMDA blocker do not form a long term memory of a food site. A CB-1 blocker causes improved memory for one site--but with reduced ability to modify the memory (Shiflett et al., 2003,2004) 4) Simply housing a chickadee in the lab results in hippocampal shrinkage and reduced survival of new neurons over birds in the wild (Tarr et al., in prep). Also visit my 5 Research/Photo Gallery entries |
Psychology Department
Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601
email: Webmaster ( fh10 @ cornell.edu )