Collaborative Research: Neural, Behavioral and Computational Investigations of Vocal Sequencing in Songbirds

University Of California-San Francisco, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed research will initiate a cross-institutional collaboration between an electrophysiologist and a computational neuroscientist to examine fundamental questions about how the brain produces complex sequences of behaviors. Research will be conducted using songbirds, animals that produce a richly structured sequence of highly reproducible song syllables. Previous studies have recorded the activity individual brain cells while birds are singing, and have shown that neural activity is locked to song production at a temporal scale of several thousands of a second, a level of precision rarely achieved in the study of complex natural behaviors. This proposal will exploit this precise relationship between brain activity and sequential behavior by recording from individual birds as they sing many song renditions. Sophisticated analysis tools will then be used to examine both brain activity and song output in great detail. Subtle variations in syllable features and syllable sequencing will be used as ?natural experiments? to determine how the precise activity of individual nerve cells are grouped together to form behavioral units (the syllables), and how these groupings of neural activity are strung together into syllable sequences. Guided by these data, computer models will be constructed to better understand the underlying biological mechanisms that orchestrate complex sequences of brain activity. As part of the proposed interdisciplinary research, novel algorithms for the fine-grained analysis of vocal behavior will be developed, and these may find application in related fields ranging from motor control to robotics to human speech. The proposal also supports a cross-institutional student exchange between the University of Texas at San Antonio, a Hispanic-Serving Institution, and the University of California San Francisco, a world-renowned center for biomedical research.