HVC neural activity supports a circular model for birdsong production

MARIANO BELLUSCIO; SANTIAGO BOARI; ANA AMADOR; CECILIA T. HERBERT; GABRIEL B. MINDLIN

Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires

Congreso; XXXII Congreso anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias (SAN); 2017

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

Songbirds are a well-established animal model for the study of vocal production, perception and learning. During singing, the respiratory system and the vocal organ are driven by neural instructions from a set of nuclei dedicated to song production. Telencephalic nucleus HVC (used as a proper name) plays a key role in the production of motor commands that drive the periphery. In canaries (Serinus canaria), the interaction between air sac pressure and muscle tension necessary for song production has been previously studied in detail. Recently, these biomechanical motor gestures have been obtained as solutions to a neural population model of the song system. This model makes specific predictions about the timing of the sparse activity in the neural nucleus HVC during the production of motor gestures. We developed a tetrode array to chronically record extracellular activity in HVC of singing canaries. We were able to isolate single units from the recorded data and found a set of neurons locked to singing behavior for different phrases. We analyzed spike time delay with respect to syllable onset for specific phrases and found that neurons fire at a particular instance within a syllable and robustly for all syllables within a phrase across renditions. Spike times from different syllables from two birds occur at note transitions within the syllable. These findings support the predictions from the neural population model.