CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Vocal learning is a particularly rare feature shared between humans and few other examples in the animal kingdom, oscine birds among them. For this reason, birdsong has become a favorite animal model to study this behavior During learning, sensori-motor experience shapes the neuronal connections within the motor system, which finally converges into a network capable of generating stereotyped motor commands. These drive the vocal device, giving rise to the specie´s characteristic song. The motor commands emerge from the interaction between different parts of the song system. In this work we have explored part of it, by measuring in vivo extracellular single unit signals from a telencephalic nucleus (HVC). This nucleus is part of the motor system and integrates motor patterns with auditory ones. It has the particularity of having neurons that selectively respond to the bird´s own song (BOS). Moreover, the activity elicited when exposed to BOS is similar to the activity generated during song production. In this work we report preliminary measurements of neural responses in anesthetized Canaries (Serinus Canaria) being exposed to the playback of their own song. The results show that these projecting neurons have sparse response to the BOS, with precise temporal coding to particular syllables. Furthermore, we analyzed these recordings in terms of a biomechanical model of the syrinx and found that the spikes occur simultaneously with specific motor gestures