Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.06.30.179861v1?rss=1 Authors: Brown, D. E., Chavez, J. I., Nguyen, D. H., Kadwory, A., Voytek, B., Arneodo, E., Gentner, T. Q., Gilja, V. Abstract: Neuronal activity within the premotor region HVC is tightly synchronized to, and crucial for, the articulate production of learned song in birds. Characterizations of this neural activity typically focuses on patterns of sequential bursting in small carefully identified subsets of single neurons in the HVC population. Much less is known about population dynamics beyond the scale of individual neurons. There is a rich history of using local field potentials (LFP), to extract information about behavior that extends beyond the contribution of individual cells. These signals have the advantage of being stable over longer periods of time and have been used to study and decode complex motor behaviors, such as human speech. Here we characterize LFP signals in the HVC of freely behaving male zebra finches during song production, to determine if population activity may yield similar insights into the mechanisms underlying complex motor-vocal behavior. Following an initial observation that structured changes in the LFP were distinct to all vocalizations during song, we show that it is possible to extract time varying features from multiple frequency bands to decode both the identity of specific vocalization elements (syllables) and predict their temporal onsets within the motif. This demonstrates that LFP is a useful signal for studying motor control in songbirds. Surprisingly, the time frequency structure of HVC LFP is similar to well established oscillations found in both human and mammalian motor areas, suggesting that similar network solutions may emerge given similar constraints. This similarity in network dynamics, despite distinct anatomical structures, may give insight to common computational principles for learning and/or generating complex motor-vocal behaviors. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info