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1 Departments of Physics and Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States
2 Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT; Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT, United States
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fee{at}mit.edu.
HVC is part of the premotor pathway necessary for song production and also a primary source of input to the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP), a basal ganglia-related circuit essential for vocal learning. We have examined the activity of identified HVC neurons of zebra finches during singing. Antidromic activation was used to identify three classes of HVC cells: neurons projecting to the premotor nucleus RA, neurons projecting to area X in the AFP, and putative HVC interneurons. HVC interneurons are active throughout the song and display tonic patterns of activity. Projection neurons exhibit highly phasic stereotyped firing patterns. X-projecting (HVC(X)) neurons burst 0-4 times per motif, while RA-projecting neurons burst extremely sparsely - at most once per motif. The bursts of HVC projection neurons are tightly locked to the song and typically have a jitter of less than 1 ms. Population activity of interneurons, but not projection neurons was significantly correlated with syllable patterns. Consistent with the idea that HVC codes for the temporal order in the song rather than for sound, the vocal dynamics and neural dynamics in HVC occur on different and uncorrelated timescales. We test whether HVC(X) neurons are auditory sensitive during singing. We recorded the activity of these neurons in juvenile birds during singing and found that firing patterns of these neurons are not altered by distorted auditory feedback, which is known to disrupt learning or to cause degradation of song already learned.
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