Cortical activity is synchronized to vocal behavior in canaries

S. BOARI, G.B. MINDLIN , A. AMADOR

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; 2nd Federation of Latin-American and Caribbean Societies for Neuroscience (FALAN) Congress; 2016

FALAN

Songbirds are a well-established animal model for studying vocal production, perception and vocal learning. During singing, the respiratory system and the vocal organ are driven by neural nuclei specifically dedicated to song production. Neurons of the telencephalic nucleus HVC have an important role in the motor commands that eventually project downstream to the biomechanical periphery. Additionally, they also display a response to auditory presentations of the bird?s own song (BOS) that elicits a similar firing pattern to the one measured when the bird is singing. In this way, the study of HVC auditory responses serve as a proxy for studying the motor control of song production.In this work, we measured local field potentials (LFPs) at HVC in urethane-anaesthetized canaries (Serinus canaria) in response to auditory presentations of BOS. Canary song is composed of subunits called phrases. Each phrase is, in turn, composed of the repetition of the same syllable with repetition rates that range from 2 Hz to 35 Hz. Interestingly, we have found that the LFPs at HVC present rhythmic oscillations locked to the syllabic rate of different song phrases. These findings present a new perspective on the study of the neural coding of vocal behavior in songbirds and are also compatible with a recently proposed neural population model for the song system.