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Song Plasticity with Chunk-Based Targeting in Male Bengalese Finches

Marina Hovhannisyan ,
1 Lena Veit ,
2 Michael Brainard3
1Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA. 2Department of Physiology, UC San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.

Introduction Plasticity with Late Target in one Chunk No Recovery to Original Song, New Baseline
The bird song: The song in male birds is a set of Baseline: 100 ms
consecutive syllables – pitches varying in frequency, Recovery Period:
intensity and duration. Although certain collections of
syllables, chunks, are often stereotyped, the syllables
between the chunks, transition points, have certain 10kHz

variability.
t à Chunk1
Learning: Song plasticity in male birds has been observed
in sequence learning, where targeting a syllable following a
transition point with negative reinforcement has forced the
prevalence of the targeted syllable to decrease1.

Plasticity has also been observed in pitch learning, where Bird song does
t à Chunk2 not recover, new
the bird has learned to avoid a punished frequency
baseline for
immediately following the target. No learning has been Chunk2/Chunk1
observed when negative reinforcement has been delayed ratio and transition
(100ms) from the target2 (Figure 1). probabilities

Plasticity with Later Target

Target ‘a’ Syllable: Target ‘o’ Syllable:

t à Chunk1 t à Chunk1
Figure 1 100 ms
References
1. Warren TL, Charlesworth JD, Tumer EC, Brainard MS (2012). Variable Sequencing Is Actively Maintained in a Well Learned Motor Skill. J Neurosci 32(44):15414-15425.
Medline
2. Tumer EC, Brainard MS (2007). Performance variability enables adaptive plasticity of ‘crystallized’ adult birdsong. Nature 450 1240-1245.

Objectives
Objectives
10kHz

Understand organization of song sequences in the bird’s Song plasticity as

the Chunk2/Chunk1
brain, in particular, if organization is chunk-based or ratio increases in the
syllable-based. presence of WN

Methods No Plasticity in New Chunk Conclusions

Methods
• Possible to achieve learning even if the targeted syllable is not
Through White Noise (WN) negative reinforcement, Target ‘s’ Syllable: one immediately following the target point
targeting syllables later in the chunk following a transition • Possibility that the song may be organized on a chunk rather
point t à Chunk2 than syllable level in the brain
Crystallized Adult Song
100ms
Next Steps
• Administer WN further in the bout to observe learning patterns
• Alter transition point to ‘dss’, rather than the ‘tch’

Acknowledgements
10kHz 100 ms
Adult Bengalese Finch
White Noise Presence

• The Brainard Lab for resources

• The UCB MCB Department for the opportunity to pursue an
10kHz honors thesis
Trigger Time
• My PI, Michael Brainard and Postdoc Lena Veit for mentorship
and guidance

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