Michael S. Brainard is a researcher in neuroscience who studies how experience shapes sensorimotor learning. His work uses songbirds to connect measured behavior with the activity of the nervous system. Song offers a particularly useful task because a young bird first hears a tutor and then uses auditory feedback to refine its own performance.[ref]
Research profile of Michael Brainard at UCSF. Research summary: sensory and sensorimotor stages of song learning
In a 2009 study with Samuel J. Sober, adult Bengalese finches heard electronically shifted pitch through custom headphones. The birds changed their own pitch in the opposite direction and returned toward baseline when normal auditory feedback resumed. Thus an apparently stable adult skill could be actively maintained by feedback control, rather than being an unchanging motor program.[ref]
Adult birdsong is actively maintained by error correction by Samuel J. Sober and Michael S. Brainard. Abstract and Figure 1: feedback perturbation and compensation
Michael S. Brainard, institutional portrait from the UCSF Neuroscience Graduate Program.
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