Synchronized HVC activity in auditory perception in canaries

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

Punta del Este

Congreso; Dynamics Days Latin America and the Caribbean 2018; 2018

CURE Punta del Este y Dynamics Days

Songbirds are a well-established animal model to study the principles underlying vocal production, perception and learning. The ?song system? is a network of neural nuclei of a songbird?s brain dedicated to these tasks. Telencephalic nucleus HVC is involved in the vocal production and receives highly processed auditory inputs. In asleep or anaesthetized birds, HVC units also respond to a playback of the birds own song (BOS). This auditory response presents a similar firing pattern to the one measured while the bird is singing, suggesting a shared coding mechanism for the two tasks.In this work, we studied the auditory responses to BOS at HVC in urethane- anaesthetized male adult canaries (Serinus canaria). Acute extracellular recordings were conducted at HVC with 32 channel multi-electrode arrays, which provided the possibility to study spatial information together with temporal modulations of the neural activity. The recorded signals allow to recover the slow components due to synaptic currents, commonly referred to as LFP (500 Hz). We found that the LFPs at HVC present rhythmic oscillations, locked to the syllabic rate of different song phrases. For a specific syllable type, we found that LFP can be related to instances of synchronous firing of multiple neurons in the recording. This experimental result is in accordance with a previously developed model for song production. This study could provide a new perspective on the study of the neural coding of auditory processing of song and its link to vocal behavior in songbirds.