ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2017
Temperature Manipulation in Songbird Brain Implicates the Premotor Nucleus HVC in Birdsong Syntax.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neural temporal scaling accounts for robust hunting behavior across temperatures.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Temperature robustness of the timing network within songbird premotor nucleus HVC.Journal of computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Respiratory contributions to birdsong-evolutionary considerations and open questions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Partially Observable Markov Models Inferred Using Statistical Tests Reveal Context-Dependent Syllable Transitions in Bengalese Finch Songs.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Perineuronal nets in motor circuitry regulate the performance of learned vocalizations in songbirds.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Goal-directed and flexible modulation of syllable sequence within birdsong.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- The role of cerebellum in learned vocal communication in adult songbirds.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- ΔCannabis and cannabinoid research · 2023Article
- Reversible inhibition of the basal ganglia prolongs repetitive vocalization but only weakly affects sequencing at branch points in songbirds.Cerebral cortex communications · 2023Article
- Review
- Plasticity of stereotyped birdsong driven by chronic manipulation of cortical-basal ganglia activity.Current biology : CB · 2021Article
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- Sex bias and omission in neuroscience research is influenced by research model and journal, but not reported NIH funding.Frontiers in neuroendocrinology · 2020Review
- Manipulations of inhibition in cortical circuitry differentially affect spectral and temporal features of Bengalese finch song.Journal of neurophysiology · 2020Article
- Effects of Cortical Cooling on Activity Across Layers of the Rat Barrel Cortex.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2020Article
- Building a state space for song learning.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2018Review
- Vocal development through morphological computation.PLoS biology · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Variable motor sequences of animals are often structured and can be described by probabilistic transition rules between action elements. Examples include the songs of many songbird species such as the Bengalese finch, which consist of stereotypical syllables sequenced according to probabilistic rules (song syntax). The neural mechanisms behind such rules are poorly understood. Here, we investigate where the song syntax is encoded in the brain of the Bengalese finch by rapidly and reversibly manipulating the temperature in the song production pathway. Cooling the premotor nucleus HVC (proper name) slows down the song tempo, consistent with the idea that HVC controls moment-to-moment timings of acoustic features in the syllables. More importantly, cooling HVC alters the transition probabilities between syllables. Cooling HVC reduces the number of repetitions of long-repeated syllables and increases the randomness of syllable sequences. In contrast, cooling the downstream motor area RA (robust nucleus of the acropallium), which is critical for singing, does not affect the song syntax. Unilateral cooling of HVC shows that control of syllables is mostly lateralized to the left HVC, whereas transition probabilities between the syllables can be affected by cooling HVC in either hemisphere to varying degrees. These results show that HVC is a key site for encoding song syntax in the Bengalese finch. HVC is thus involved both in encoding timings within syllables and in sequencing probabilistic transitions between syllables. Our finding suggests that probabilistic selections and fine-grained timings of action elements can be integrated within the same neural circuits.
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