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Published June 2015 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Mesoscopic Patterns of Neural Activity Support Songbird Cortical Sequences

Abstract

Time-locked sequences of neural activity can be found throughout the vertebrate forebrain in various species and behavioral contexts. From "time cells" in the hippocampus of rodents to cortical activity controlling movement, temporal sequence generation is integral to many forms of learned behavior. However, the mechanisms underlying sequence generation are not well known. Here, we describe a spatial and temporal organization of the songbird premotor cortical microcircuit that supports sparse sequences of neural activity. Multi-channel electrophysiology and calcium imaging reveal that neural activity in premotor cortex is correlated with a length scale of 100 µm. Within this length scale, basal-ganglia–projecting excitatory neurons, on average, fire at a specific phase of a local 30 Hz network rhythm. These results show that premotor cortical activity is inhomogeneous in time and space, and that a mesoscopic dynamical pattern underlies the generation of the neural sequences controlling song.

Additional Information

© 2015 Markowitz et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received: November 6, 2014; Accepted: April 22, 2015; Published: June 3, 2015. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (http://www.nsf.gov/) Science of Learning Center CELEST (grant number SBE-0354378), the National Institutes of Health (http://www.nih.gov/) (grant number 1R01NS089679), by a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (http://www.bwfund.org/) and a Smith Family award (http://www.hria.org/tmfgrants/smith/) to TJG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors would like to thank Ian Davison, Michael Long, Bence Olveczky, and members of the Eichenbaum and Gardner labs for useful comments on the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank Howard Eichenbaum and the Center for Neuroscience at Boston University for supporting the development of methods used in this study. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: JEM WAL TJG. Performed the experiments: JEM WAL GG. Analyzed the data: JEM WAL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: TV CL. Wrote the paper: JEM WAL TJG. Data Availability: All data used in this study are available on figshare (http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1328060). The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Attached Files

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Supplemental Material - journal.pbio.1002158.s006.MP4

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Additional details

Created:
September 15, 2023
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October 23, 2023