In fact, neurobiologist Evan Balaban and two co-workers recently produced baby chickens that hatched expecting mama to sound like a quail. A deep and abiding question in neurobiology concerns how newborns of any species know what is important and unimportant in the environment when they are born.
Human infants seem to be born already knowing a lot about human speech.
But they can do that only if they are already kind of able to tell speech sounds from other sounds. Studies have shown that very young babies are very interested in the sounds of voices, he said. Balaban, who recently moved his research to the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, several years ago had discovered the first evidence of behavior transfer, showing the physical movements involved in crowing can be transferred from quail embryos into chickens. His latest finding moves beyond the physical to show that expectation, or perceptions, are transferrable. Researchers isolated specific chunks of nervous system tissue that will build the brain in quails, and implanted them into the developing nervous systems of embryonic chicks.