Replay of innate vocal patterns during night sleep in suboscines

JUAN DOPPLER; MANON PELTIER; ANA AMADOR; FRANZ GOLLER; G B MINDLIN; G B MINDLIN

PROCEEDINGS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. SERIES B: BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES.

ROYAL SOC

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2021

0962-8452

Activation of forebrain circuitry during sleep has been variably characterizedas ?pre- or replay? and has been linked to memory consolidation. The evol-utionary origins of this mechanism, however, are unknown. Sleep activationof the sensorimotor pathways of learned birdsong is a particularly usefulmodel system because the muscles controlling the vocal organ are activated,revealing syringeal activity patterns for direct comparison with those ofdaytime vocal activity. Here, we show that suboscine birds, which developtheir species-typical songs innately without the elaborate forebrain?thalamic circuitry of the vocal learning taxa, also engage in replay duringsleep. In two tyrannid species, the characteristic syringeal activation patternsof the song could also be identified during sleep. Similar to song-learningoscines, the burst structure was more variable during sleep than daytimesong production. In kiskadees (Pitangus sulphuratus), a second vocalization,which is part of a multi-modal display, was also replayed during sleepalong with one component of the visual display. These data show unambigu-ously that variable ?replay? of stereotyped vocal motor programmes is notrestricted to programmes confined within forebrain circuitry. The proposedeffects on vocal motor programme maintenance are, therefore, building on apre-existing neural mechanism that predates the evolution of learned vocalmotor behaviour.