My academic research focused on the cognitive and neural bases of vocal communication, social processing, and navigation.

My postdoc work at the University of California, San Diego examined the encoding of cognitive maps and social space in the primate brain, specifically in common marmoset monkeys.

I received my PhD in 2021 in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. My PhD research examined how songbirds and parrots listen to sequences of sounds and the acoustic features of individual elements using both behavioral and neurophysiological techniques. This work highlighted intriguing differences between how birds and humans perceive vocal communication signals. 

Popular Science Articles

What Birds Really Listen for in Birdsong (It’s Not What You Think) in Scientific American, May 2022.

Birds Can Tell Us a Lot about Human Language in Scientific American blog, Feb 2018.

How Canaries Listen to Song. Acoustics.org. June 2017.

Scholarly Publications

Stennette, K.A., Fishbein, A.R., Prior, N.H., Ball, G.F., Dooling, R.J. Sound order discrimination in two species of birds—Taeniopygia guttata and Melopsittacus undulatus. Journal of Comparative Psychology. 2023.

Fishbein, A. R. Auditory pattern discrimination in budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). Behavioural Processes. 2022.

Jovanovic, V., Fishbein, A.R., de la Mothe, L., Lee, K-F, Miller, C.T. Behavioral context affects social signal representations within single primate prefrontal cortex neurons. Neuron. 2022.

Fishbein, A. R.*, Prior, N.H.*, Brown, J.B.,  Ball, G. F., Dooling, R. J. Discrimination of natural acoustic variation in vocal signals. Scientific Reports. 2021.

Fishbein, A. R., Idsardi, W. J., Ball, G. F., Dooling, R. J.Sound sequences in birdsong: how much do birds really care? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 2020.

Fishbein, A. R., Fritz, J. B., Idsardi, W. J, Wilkinson, G. S.What can animal communication teach us about human language? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 2020.

Brown, J. B., Brittan-Powell, E. F., Dooling, R. J., Fishbein, A. R., Ball, G. F., Madison, F. N. Strain differences in hearing in song canaries.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2019.

Fishbein, A. R., Lawson, S. L., Dooling, R.J., Ball, G.F. How Canaries Listen to Their Song: Species-Specific Shape of Auditory Perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2019.

Fishbein, A. R., Löschner, J., Mallon, J. M, Wilkinson, G. S. Dynamic Sex-Specific Responses to Synthetic Songs in a Duetting Suboscine Passerine. PLOS ONE. 2018.

Lawson, S.L., Fishbein, A. R., Prior, N.H., Dooling, R.J., Ball, G.F. Relative Salience of Syllable Structure and Syllable Order in Zebra Finch Song. Animal Cognition. 2018.