Cortical activity is synchronized to vocal behavior in canaries

ANA AMADOR; SANTIAGO BOARI; GABRIEL B. MINDLIN

CABA

Congreso; 2nd FALAN Congress; 2016

Federation of Latin-American and Caribbean Societies for Neuroscience (FALAN)

Songbirds are a well-established animal model for studying vocal production, perceptionand vocal learning. During singing, the respiratory system and the vocal organ are drivenby neural nuclei specifically dedicated to song production. Neurons of the telencephalicnucleus HVC have an important role in the motor commands that eventually projectdownstream to the biomechanical periphery. Additionally, they also display a response toauditory presentations of the bird?s own song (BOS) that elicits a similar firing pattern tothe one measured when the bird is singing. In this way, the study of HVC auditoryresponses 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-anaesthetizedcanaries (Serinus canaria) in response to auditory presentations of BOS. Canary song iscomposed of subunits called phrases. Each phrase is, in turn, composed of the repetitionof the same syllable with repetition rates that range from 2 Hz to 35 Hz. Interestingly, wehave found that the LFPs at HVC present rhythmic oscillations locked to the syllabic rateof different song phrases. These findings present a new perspective on the study of theneural coding of vocal behavior in songbirds and are also compatible with a recentlyproposed neural population model for the song system.