Characterization of Pre-motor Region Contributions to the Productions of Call

BROWN, DARIL E.; A. SRINVASANI; P. M. TOSTADO; J. CHAVEZ; D. H. NGUYEN; E. M. ARNEODO; T. GENTNER; V. GILJA

Chicago

Encuentro; Society for Neuroscience annual meeting; 2021

Society for Neuroscience

Songbirds are a powerful model for studying the acquisition and production of complex learned vocal behavior. Zebra Finches in particular have been heavily studied for their stereotyped motif which is a major component of their song. However, the syllables of the motif are only a small portion of the zebra finch’s vocal repertoire. The majority of their vocal behavior consists of vocalizations collectively referred to as ‘calls’. Calls refer to all vocalizations that are not the introductory note or part of the stereotyped motif; some are learned and others are not. While previous work has found that neural activity in pre-motor nuclei (i.e. HVC and RA) encodes information regarding which syllable the bird will sing, few studies focus on elucidating what activity, if any, relates to call production. Here we report novel spectral features of neural activity that correlate with call identity in a premotor nuclei. We applied unsupervised dimensionality reduction techniques to map spectrograms of manually segmented Calls to a lower dimensional representation. The spectrograms of the calls were then manually clustered and annotated based upon this representation. The neural activity recorded during each call was then analyzed using methods previously used to study motif syllable production (Brown et al. 2021). We report finding phase preference to motor onset of calls similar to that reported to syllable production in HVC of songbirds. Specifically, we find statistically significant Inter-Trial Phase Coherence (ITPC) in Local Field Potentials (LFP) across multiple types of calls in frequencies ranging from 2-50 Hz. Our results give preliminary evidence that the pre-motor nuclei of the song system play a role in the production of vocal units other than the syllables of the stereotyped motif. These results elucidate the relationship between pre-motor nuclei in the song system to call production and help clarify the function of these nuclei in regards to the generation of vocal behavior.