Park, T., Okanoya, K., and Dooling, R. (1985). Operant conditioning of small birds for acoustic discrimination. Journal of Ethology (Japan), 3, 5-9.

Standard operant conditioning techniques have been successfully applied to the problem of call discrimination in small birds. Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and canaries (Serinus canarius) were trained with a GO/NOGO procedure using positive reinforcement to discriminate between both conspecific contact calls and contact calls of the other species. Budgerigars showed equal facility at each task. By contrast, canaries learned the task involving conspecific contact calls but failed, as a group, to discriminate between budgerigar contact calls. These results show that conditioning techniques can be used to study perceptual learning of species typical calls in small birds.