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.
 Received: 8 September 2017, Accepted: 7 December 2017; Edited by: A. Martí; Reviewed by: Y. S. Zhang, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton, NJ, USA.; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4279/PIP.100002
 Cite as: G C Dima, M A Goldin, G B Mindlin, Papers in Physics 10, 100002 (2018)
 This paper, by G C Dima, M A Goldin, G B Mindlin, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.
Highlights
Birdsong is a remarkable example of how a complex behavior emerges from the interaction of peripheral motor areas and the central nervous system
We tested the hypothesis that at least two separate timescales are responsible for the generation of the respiratory motor gestures during birdsong production
We studied quantitatively the deformations of the air sac pressure patterns of syllables under temperature changes in terms of interpretable parameters of a circular model, that account for the activity in brain areas related to motor gesture generation
Summary
Birdsong is a remarkable example of how a complex behavior emerges from the interaction of peripheral motor areas and the central nervous system. The song motor pathway, which comprises the regions in the bird’s brain that generate motor instructions for singing, involves several nuclei. These are located in the telencephalon, thalamus and brainstem [1,2,3,4,5]. The brain motor pathway commands the activities of the respiratory system and the vocal organ called syrinx, a bipartite structure located between the bronchi and the trachea. The result is a succession of pressure gestures that are in a delicate coordination with the muscle activity in the syrinx [6,7,8,9] These are commonly designated as syllables, which are the smallest units of a song, usually separated by silent gaps when the bird inspirates. The song starts with a long expiratory pulse that consists of a series of small pressure
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