Sensory and Motor Systems
Author: Fiamma Liz Leites | email: fiamma.liz17@gmail.com
Fiamma L. Leites 1°, Cecilia T. Herbert 1°, Santiago Boari 1°, Gabriel B. Mindlin 1°, Ana Amador 1°
1° Departamento de Física, FCEN, UBA and IFIBA-CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina
The telencephalic nucleus HVC (proper name) is a brain area involved in the motor control and auditory processing of birdsong. Electrophysiological recordings have shown that HVC neurons have selective auditory responses, firing more to the presentation of the birds own song (BOS) than to almost all other sounds. The songs of canaries (Serinus canaria) have a complex structure composed by a sequence of phrases formed by the repetition of stereotyped units called syllables, which can be grouped into defined categories according to their expiratory pressure pulses and have specific syllabic repetition rate. We analyzed recordings of extracellular neuronal activity in the nucleus HVC responding to the presentation of auditory stimuli in freely behaving canaries. The stimuli were the bird’s own song (BOS), the temporarily reversed bird´s song, and the song of a conspecific. We observed that neurons in HVC respond selectively to BOS at certain phrases, and categorized the neural activity according to particular properties. For this work, we selected two syllable types for an exhaustive analysis. In one of them, we observed that neural responses occur at two specific instances of the syllable. In the second syllable type, there was one instance where neural activity increased. Very little is known about the auditory activity in HVC during wakefulness in canaries, so these results open a new line of research.