Evidence for maintenance of key components of vocal learning in aging budgerigars despite diminished affiliative social interaction

In some species, the ability to acquire new vocalizations persists into adulthood and may be an important mediator of social interactions. While it is generally assumed that vocal learning persists undiminished throughout the lifespan of these open-ended learners, the stability of this trait remains largely unexplored. We hypothesize that vocal learning exhibits senescence, as is typical of complex cognitive traits, and that this decline may relate to age-dependent changes in sociality. The budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), an open-ended learner which develops new contact call types that are shared with social associates upon joining new flocks, provides a robust assay for measuring the effects of aging on vocal learning ability. We formed captive flocks of 4 previously unfamiliar adult males of the same age class, either “young adults” (6 mo.-1 yr.) or “older adults” (≥ 3 yr.), and concurrently tracked changes in contact call structure and social interactions over time. Older adult..., , This dataset contains dataframes (.csv & .xlsx) of both vocal and social raw data and the corresponding code used in analyzing this data in the form of R scripts (.R & .Rmd). A description of the contents of each data or script file can be found in the README file provided. The dataset also contains example video recordings of the types of budgerigar affiliative and agonistic social interactions measured in the study., # Title of Dataset: Evidence for persistent vocal learning in aging budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) despite diminished social connectedness

---

This dataset contains vocal and social data from an experiment investigating the effect of aging on vocal production learning and social integration in flocks of male budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). This open-ended learner develops new contact call types that are shared with social associates upon joining new social groups. We formed captive flocks of 4 previously unfamiliar adult male birds belonging to the same age class, either “young adults” (6 mo-1 yr) or “older adults” (≥ 3 yr), and concurrently tracked changes in contact call structure and affiliative, agonistic, and proximity-based social interactions over time. Contact calls were isolated from audio recordings using an automated selection procedure and they were characterized in two-dimensional 'acoustic space' based on various extracted spectrographic features to measure...