Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) are small Australian parrots with a well-documented, learned vocal repertoire and a high degree of vocal production learning. These birds live in large, social flocks and they vocally interact with each other in a dynamic, reciprocal manner. We assume that budgerigars must process and integrate a wide variety of sensory stimuli when selecting appropriate vocal responses to conspecifics during vocal interactions, but the relative contributions of these different stimuli to that process are next to impossible to tease apart in a natural context. Here we show that budgerigars, under operant control, can learn to respond to specific stimuli with a specific vocal response. Budgerigars were trained to produce contact calls to a combination of auditory and visual cues. Birds learned to produce specific contact calls to stimuli that differed either in location (visual or auditory) or quality (visual). Interestingly, the birds could not learn to associate different vocal responses with different auditory stimuli coming from the same location. Surprisingly, this was so even when the auditory stimuli and the responses were the same (i.e., the bird’s own contact call). These results show that even in a highly controlled operant context, acoustic cues alone were not sufficient to support vocal production learning in budgerigars. From a different perspective, these results highlight the significant role that social interaction likely plays in vocal production learning so elegantly shown by Irene Pepperberg’s work in parrots.

虎皮鹦鹉 ( Melopsittacus undulatus ) 是一种小型澳大利亚鹦鹉，具有详细记录、学习的发声技巧和高度的发声学习能力。这些鸟生活在大型的社会性群体中，它们以动态、互惠的方式彼此进行声音互动。我们假设虎皮鹦鹉在声音互动过程中选择对同种的适当声音反应时必须处理和整合各种各样的感官刺激，但这些不同刺激对该过程的相对贡献在自然环境中几乎不可能区分。在这里，我们表明虎皮鹦鹉在操作控制下可以学会用特定的声音反应来响应特定的刺激。虎皮鹦鹉经过训练，可以根据听觉和视觉提示发出联系呼叫。鸟类学会了对不同位置（视觉或听觉）或质量（视觉）的刺激发出特定的接触叫声。有趣的是，鸟类无法学会将不同的声音反应与来自同一位置的不同听觉刺激联系起来。令人惊讶的是，即使听觉刺激和反应相同（即鸟自己的联系叫声），情况也是如此。这些结果表明，即使在高度控制的操作环境中，仅声音提示也不足以支持虎皮鹦鹉的发声学习。从不同的角度来看，这些结果凸显了社交互动在发声学习中可能发挥的重要作用，艾琳·佩珀伯格（Irene Pepperberg）在鹦鹉身上的研究就完美地展示了这一点。