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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]

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]

Samuel J. Sober is a researcher in motor learning and the control of skilled movement. His laboratory combines recordings from neurons and muscles, behavioral experiments and computational analysis to investigate how the nervous system produces and adjusts movement. These approaches connect an animal's observable performance with candidate mechanisms for controlling it.^[ref]

With Michael S. Brainard, Samuel J. Sober tested whether adult birds continually correct vocal errors. A microphone captured Bengalese finch song and processing equipment altered its pitch before playing it through headphones. Compensatory changes in the birds' pitch showed adjustment to a measurable error in auditory feedback. Unlike deafening alone, this manipulation supplied an error that a change in behavior could reduce.^[ref]