UC San Diego

The neuroethology of song learning, production, and maintenance in songbirds presents interesting similarities to human speech. We have developed a biophysical model of the manner in which song could be maintained in adult songbirds. This model may inform us about the human counterpart to these processes. In songbirds, signals generated in nucleus High Vocal center (HVc) follow a direct route along a premotor pathway to the robust nucleus of the archistriatum (RA) as well as an indirect route to RA through the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP): the neurons of RA are innervated from both sources. HVc expresses very sparse bursts of spikes having interspike intervals of about 2 ms. The expressions of these bursts arrive at the RA with a time difference DeltaT approximate to 50 +/- 10 ms between the two pathways. The observed combination of AMPA and NMDA receptors at RA projection neurons suggests that long-term potentiation and long-term depression can both be induced by spike timing plasticity through the pairing of the HVc and AFP signals. We present a dynamical model that stabilizes this synaptic plasticity through a feedback from the RA to the AFP using known connections. The stabilization occurs dynamically and is absent when the RA --> AFP connection is removed. This requires a dynamical selection of DeltaT. The model does this, and DeltaT lies within the observed range. Our model represents an illustration of a functional consequence of activity-dependent plasticity directly connected with neuroethological observations. Within the model the parameters of the AFP, and thus the magnitude of DeltaT, can also be tuned to an unstable regime. This means that destabilization might be induced by neuromodulation of the AFP.