Sarah Woolley, PhD

Sarah Woolley, PhD

Research Interest

Cognitive/Systems Neuroscience
Systems and Circuits
Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience: Non-human Models

We study social communication and the coordinated neural systems underlying the perception and production of communication signals. Like us, songbirds communicate using hearing and voice, and they learn to sing during development by copying the songs of adults they interact with socially. Our research focuses on understanding how songbird neural circuits have evolved for auditory-vocal communication and are shaped by experience during the critical period for song learning.

Rivera, M., Edwards, J.A., Hauber, M.E., Woolley, SMN. Machine learning and statistical classification of birdsong link vocal acoustic features with phylogeny. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-33825-5

Moore JM, Woolley SMN. Emergent tuning for learned vocalizations in auditory cortex. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 31406364 DOI: 10.1038/s41593-019-0458-4

Calabrese A, Woolley SMN. Coding principles of the canonical cortical microcircuit in the avian brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID 25691736 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1408545112

Woolley, SMN. Early Experience and Auditory Development in Songbirds. In: Springer Handbook on Auditory Research: Auditory Development and Plasticity, Vol. 63. Eds. Cramer, K., Coffin, A., Fay, R.R., Popper, A.