Development and application of a robotic zebra finch (RoboFinch) to study multimodal cues in vocal communication

Understanding animal behaviour through psychophysical experimentation is often limited by insufficiently realistic stimulus representation. Important physical dimensions of signals and cues, especially those that are outside the spectrum of human perception, can be difficult to standardize and control separately with currently available recording and displaying techniques (e.g. video displays). Accurate stimulus control is in particular important when studying multimodal signals, as spatial and temporal alignment between stimuli is often crucial. Especially for audiovisual presentations, some of these limitations can be circumvented by the employment of animal robots that are superior to video presentations in all situations requiring realistic 3D presentations to animals. Here we report the development of a robotic zebra finch, called RoboFinch, and how it can be used to study vocal learning in a songbird, the zebra finch.