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Explore the neuroethology of vocal communication in Mongolian gerbils through this 32-minute webinar presented by Dr. Alex Williams from NYU's Center for Neural Science and the Flatiron Institute. Discover how social animals use vocalizations for communication and learn about innovative approaches to studying natural vocal communication dynamics and their neural foundations. Examine the establishment of Mongolian gerbils as a unique model organism with sophisticated vocal repertoires and complex social hierarchies, including pair bond formation. Investigate the use of variational autoencoders (VAE) for unsupervised representation learning of acoustic features from continuous 20-day recordings of three gerbil families, revealing family-specific vocal repertoires. Understand the challenges of vocal call attribution in group settings and explore solutions including supervised deep learning frameworks with calibrated uncertainty estimates for state-of-the-art sound source localization, novel hardware solutions for generating benchmark datasets, and the first large-scale benchmark datasets for vocal call localization in social rodents. Learn about statistical models for characterizing functional flexibility in large-scale neural circuits and how neural ensemble dynamics change during skill learning, attention periods, and development. Gain insights into cutting-edge research methodologies combining neuroscience, machine learning, and behavioral analysis to advance understanding of social vocal communication systems.
