Anterior forebrain pathway in parrots is necessary for producing learned vocalizations with individual signatures
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (Arcadia Science)
Abstract
Article activity feed
-
-
-
Overall, this is a very clear and thorough investigation which uncovers an interesting biological circuit. These findings help explain the variable vocal capacity of parrots, and perhaps even the same capacity in humans. Well done!
-
Second, though our study only examined the vocalizations of birds in297isolation, it will be interesting to study the social dynamics of small groups of birds in which some298birds have their vocal signatures degraded with frontal inactivations described here
I agree, this would be fascinating!
-
e found that with enough information from231the spectrograms, the SVM could still decode caller identity on the TTX dataset with a decent232level of accuracy (Figure 5D).
What an interesting result! Does this suggest that the individual-distinguishing features are not, for the most part, lost, but instead shift after TTX? Could you discuss more about the implications of this?
-
calls converged to a centered cluster following AFP inactivation, suggesting the loss of individual216identity information
This is very cool! Can you tell if the acoustic changes identified in Figure 4 are responsible for this convergence, or if is due to other features?
-
we infused saline (PBS) or tetrodotoxin (TTX 50 μM) into the probe on alternating days
This seems like an effective strategy that clearly had a strong behavioral result! My understanding is that ttx can also effect fibers of passage, is that relevant in this case? By using ttx can you also infer other brain regions with fibers that go through or near MO/NAO that might be important for call variability?
-
With118eight or more principal inputs, the SVM correctly predicted bird identity more than 90% of the time,119even though birds shared highly similar calls.
Is the number of inputs related to the number of experimental subjects used in this study, or seperate? More generally, can you identify the biological features that allow for discrimination of call identity? It was interesting to me, for instance, that sex did not seem to strongly impact clustering or identity on the UMAP. What spectral or other features do determine clustering?
-
solated birds responded to colony noise96with the production of contact calls so reliably that we were able to obtain hundreds to thousands97of contact calls per day with this method (average counts range: 180-1612, n=8 birds, Figure 2B)
This is an impressive volume of calls! Did you observe variation in the calls, within an individual over trials or days of recordings, as well as the reported differences across weeks? What aspects of contact calls do you think are preserved in this experimental setup and which are altered in this paradigm?
-