An avian cortical circuit for chunking tutor song syllables into simple vocal-motor units
Name
s41467-020-18732-x.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
3.54 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
3c0dcc400e16b39a49a38f469874e754
Author(s)
Mackevicius, Emily Lambert
Happ, Michael TL
Fee, Michale S.
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020, The Author(s). How are brain circuits constructed to achieve complex goals? The brains of young songbirds develop motor circuits that achieve the goal of imitating a specific tutor song to which they are exposed. Here, we set out to examine how song-generating circuits may be influenced early in song learning by a cortical region (NIf) at the interface between auditory and motor systems. Single-unit recordings reveal that, during juvenile babbling, NIf neurons burst at syllable onsets, with some neurons exhibiting selectivity for particular emerging syllable types. When juvenile birds listen to their tutor, NIf neurons are also activated at tutor syllable onsets, and are often selective for particular syllable types. We examine a simple computational model in which tutor exposure imprints the correct number of syllable patterns as ensembles in an interconnected NIf network. These ensembles are then reactivated during singing to train a set of syllable sequences in the motor network.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-020-18732-X
