London, Jan 13 (IANS) Sleep is the tonic that helps humans stabilise information and tasks learned during the preceding day. Now researchers have found that sleep has similar effects upon learning in the starling bird specie - a discovery that will open a window to how the brain learns and preserves information.
“We really wanted to behaviourally show that these types of sleep-dependent memory benefits are occurring in animals,” said Timothy Brawn, graduate student at the University of Chicago (U-C), who led the study.

“What was remarkable was that the pattern here looks very similar to what we see in humans. There wasn’t anything that was terribly different.”

In order to survive, animals must be able to learn from experience, and understanding the biology of this process remains an open scientific question.

In 2008, Brawn and co-authors Kimberly Fenn, Howard Nusbaum, and Daniel Margoliash found that a night’s sleep stabilised the skills of people learning to play a first-person shooter video game.

But sleep-dependent consolidation had not been conclusively proven behaviourally in adult animals. So Brawn set out to replicate the findings of his human study in the starling, a bird known for its vocal production and listening skills.

Starlings were trained to discriminate between two five-second snippets of birdsong in a learning task called a go-nogo procedure.

Groups of starlings were trained in the task at different times of day, then re-tested later to see how well they retained their learning, said a Chicago release.

In all groups, performance improved after the birds slept, relative to their performance before sleep. That result replicated the sleep-dependent enhancement pattern observed in human studies.

These findings were published in the Wednesday edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.

-

St/pg/jg