Hough Lab

Homing pigeons are a unique model for assessing age-related declines in working memory, due to their selective breeding for exceptional long-distance spatial memory. Our lab uses this species to investigate the types of spatial memory that are most affected by aging.

The avian hippocampus is a complex brain structure that shares remarkable similarities with the mammalian hippocampus. In our lab, we are looking at the neural representation of spatial features in the avian hippocampus, and the effects of aging on these internal representations.

The seaside sparrow is an east coast inhabitant of salt marshes, and can be found from Massachusetts down the coastline and across the coastal Gulf of Mexico. This narrow range lends the species to devloping local song dialects across the range. We are the first lab to investigate local and regional variation of song in this species.

The song control and learning circuits in songbirds is well characterized, but for the most part limited to birds that sing a single song type as adults. Our lab is investigating birds, such as the white-crowned and seaside sparrows, that sing more than a single song type. We are interested in how the song system encodes and controls multiple song types as an animal model for how human language is encoded at the neural level.