Gender differences in budgerigar vocal behavior and brain working style Kitasato University, Japan Women's University

　Among birds, parrots, sparrows, and hummingbirds have vocal learning abilities and are considered to be excellent models for biological understanding of human language.Among them, the budgerigar, which is a member of Aum, is said to be an excellent model for understanding human language learning and voice communication learning behavior, such as imitating human language.Therefore, we conducted this study for the purpose of exploring the vocal behavior of paired budgerigars to their spouses and the gender difference in the neural basis of the brain, which is the source of that behavior.

In the study, males and females were artificially paired and bred for 5 weeks, then the pairing was resolved, and the voices of the spouse and non-spouse were alternately heard to compare how to respond.At that time, when examining the area called CMM, which is the higher auditory center, when the spouse's voice was heard, the left and right cerebral hemispheres showed higher activity in females than in the silent state, but in males, the spouse showed higher activity. When I heard the voice of the person, I found that the activity was increased only on the right hemisphere side of the CMM.

　It is known that there are gender differences in language function in the human brain.Therefore, neurobehavioral studies of birds similar to the human sensory language field (Wernicke's field) will lead to the elucidation of the biological basis of gender differences and the lateralization mechanism of the brain found in human language function.Furthermore, elucidating the neural basis of the vocal learning mechanism of budgerigars is expected to contribute to the elucidation of the cause of higher brain dysfunction such as aphasia.