Minor changes in repeated actions could be part of an unconscious effort to improve performance, said U.S. researchers who studied subtle variations in the pitch of a bird’s song.
Practice, practice, practice … adult birdsong is a complex, learned motor skill, even for a white-crowned sparrow.
(Katherine Oman/Associated Press)
Researchers Evren Turner and Michael Brainard of the University of California, San Francisco, suggest their findings, which appear online Wednesday in the British scientific journal Nature, shed new light into why everyone from high-performance athletes to musicians vary in even the most highly practised skills.
The two researchers said that even when performing practised actions — like the way a hockey player laces up skates or how a guitarist might play a chord — there is always some minor variation between different attempts.
One possible explanation is that the nervous system is either unable to control such variation or does not consider it relevant to the action, the researchers said.
The researchers decided to test another explanation — that on some level the variation is intentional — by studying the birdsong of adult bengalese finches.
“Adult birdsong is a complex, learned motor skill that is produced in a highly stereotyped fashion from one rendition to the next,” they wrote.
“Nevertheless, there is subtle trial-by-trial variation in even stable, ‘crystallized’ adult song.”
The researchers tested their theory by focusing their attention on a song element that included the minor natural variations. They then introduced artificial bursts of white noise when a particular syllable of the bird’s song hit high notes.
After three days, the frequency of the syllable was greatly reduced, suggesting the variation between high and low frequencies, while minor, was within the bird’s control.
The authors aren’t sure whether the changes are guided by senses — for example, actually hearing the change in pitch — or if they are guided by central neural activity.
But they said being able to monitor and make such changes could help the birds maintain stable songs despite changes to their vocal control system due to age and injury.
“More generally, our results suggest that residual variability in well-learned skills is not entirely noise, but rather reflects meaningful motor explanation that can support continuous learning and optimization of performance,” they said.
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