Modeling temperature manipulations in a circular model of birdsong production

Abstract

The nature of the neural mechanisms in the birdsong motor pathway that lead to the generation of respiratory patterns are a matter of extensive debate. In a top-down control paradigm, vocal gestures emerge from a unique timescale ruled by the telencephalic nucleus HVC, which engages other brain regions downstream. Another possibility is that the generation of motor instructions is distributed throughout the neural network, flowing both upstream and downstream. In this circular architecture, the song results from the integration of more than one timescale. In order to disambiguate these views, we used local focal cooling of HVC in canaries to manipulate the timescale present there. Within the frame of the circular model, we fitted the experimental pressure patterns of different types of syllables, which form a full song. We show that at least two separate timescales must be taken into account to reproduce them, one which is manipulated by cooling while the other remains unchanged. The modifications -stretching and breaking-of the syllables were quantitatively reproduced in this frame.

Dynamical model for the neural activity of singing Serinus canaria

“…Since the output of this nucleus is closely related to an observable which is easy to measure (the air sac pressure during song production), over the last years we have built a dynamical system representing the different areas of the song system, to test whether the model was capable of reproducing the respiratory gestures of a singing bird. This model was reported in the literature (e.g., Alonso et al, 2015and Dima et al, 2018b. It has a number of compartments compatible with the known anatomy of the avian brain.…”

“…In order to find a quantitative description that could link the physiological instructions used during song production with some of what we know about the song system, we recently built a dynamical model that (1) Is consistent with the basic architecture of the song system, (2) Can fit the respiratory output of the song system, and (3) Can make precise predictions on the neural activity of an accessible part of the song system (Alonso et al, 2015(Alonso et al, , 2016Dima et al, 2018a;2018b). In this work, we report for the first time single-unit neural activity recorded in singing canaries (Serinus canaria), in one of the brain areas described by our dynamical model, for which we found a good correspondence between neural recordings and neural modelling.…”

“…In this way, the variables of our dynamical model will be the average activities of the neurons, represented in Fig. 1(b) (Alonso et al, 2015 andDima et al, 2018b).…”