"Instead of asking the owls to learn in one large step, we broke the problem down into small steps," said Brie Linkenhoker, a Stanford graduate student and first author on the paper. "We found that they could learn substantially more this way."
Adult animals are less able to learn new skills - witness any adult trying to master a new language. It turns out that the brains of younger animals are more able to make and break connections between neurons, allowing those animals to quickly pick up new skills and information. This phenomenon is the reason that children recover much faster from head injuries than adults.
To test adult learning, Eric Knudsen, PhD, the Edward C. and Amy H. Sewall Professor in the School of Medicine, and Linkenhoker took advantage of a quirk in barn owl brains. These owls develop a mental map of their world that aligns the auditory world with the visual one. When the animal hears a noise at a specific location, a nerve cell in the map region of the brain fires. That same nerve cell fires when the animal sees an object at that same physical location. The animals use this map with deadly accuracy to pinpoint prey when hunting at night.
In young barn owls, Knudsen has been able to alter the auditory map of the world by having the owls wear lenses that shift their visual world to the left or right. Over time, the young owl's brain compensates so that the auditory map once again coincides with the visual map. But pity the poor adult owl. When these owls wear world-shifting lenses, their brains adjust o
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Contact: Michelle Brandt
mbrandt@stanford.edu
650-723-0272
Stanford University Medical Center
18-Sep-2002