Function of basal ganglia-cortical circuits in vocal learning in early life

基底神经节-皮质回路在早期声音学习中的功能

• 批准号: 8536416
• 负责人: Satoshi Kojima
• 金额: $ 7.58万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2014-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8536416
• 关键词: Acoustics; Address; Adolescent; Adult; Anterior; Aversive Stimulus; Basal Ganglia; Behavior; Behavior Control; Birds; Cell Nucleus; Complex; Data; Development; Functional disorder; Human; Infant; Learning; Left; Life; Measures; Modeling; Motor; Motor Skills; Movement Disorders; Negative Reinforcements; Neurophysiology - biologic function; Operant Conditioning; Output; Parents; Parkinson Disease; Pathway interactions; Performance; Play; Process; Production; Prosencephalon; Psychological reinforcement; Reporting; Research; Role; Songbirds; Source; Speech; Structure; Study models; Testing; Training; Variant; Work; age related; bird song; critical period; insight; juvenile animal; neuromechanism; relating to nervous system; response; sequence learning; vocal learning; vocalization

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Young songbirds learn to produce complex vocalizations (song) from their adult tutor during a critical period of development, just as human infants learn to speak from their parents. Since song learning critically depends on a discrete and specialized basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuit called the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP), songbirds offer a great and rare opportunity to study the mechanisms underlying basal ganglia-dependent learning of complex motor skills in early life. One of the major obstacles in studying song learning mechanisms is complexity of the behavior. Juvenile birds gradually develop their song from unstructured and highly variable vocalizations akin to human babbling, by changing many acoustic and temporal features all together. This highly complex learning makes it difficult to examine precise functions of neural structures and activity in behavior. Recent studies have overcome this difficulty by using much simpler learning of adult song, which is experimentally induced using an operant conditioning paradigm with aversive stimuli and is targeted to a specific feature of song (e.g., pitch of a particular portion of song). Althouh these studies have revealed important functions of the AFP in adult song learning, it is still unknown whether the same functions are employed for the much more complex, self-driven learning of juvenile song. Indeed, several recent findings, including my own preliminary data, even raise the possibility that juvenile song learning is substantially different from that of aduls in its mechanisms. Thus, examining whether the findings in adult song learning are generally applicable to juvenile song learning is critically important for understanding the mechanisms of song learning, and an answer either way will be a significant advance in the birdsong research field. This proposal specifically addresses this issue by directly comparing several aspects of AFP's function in juvenile song learning with those in adult song learning reported previously. To do so, I will use new behavioral manipulations of juvenile learning that allow us to precisely analyze the same features of juvenile song as those analyzed in adult song learning (both pitch and sequence), and thus enable us to examine the AFP's function in the same way as that in the adult learning studies. This study will not only test whether adults provide a faithful model fr studying mechanisms of juvenile song learning, but will also show that detailed analyses of song learning mechanisms can be done even in juveniles, using targeted manipulations of learning - this provides a new and powerful approach to the study of vocal learning mechanisms in songbirds. Moreover, this study has the potential to reveal differences in neural mechanisms between self-driven, age-dependent development of complex motor skills in young animals such as speech acquisition in human infants, and simple, training-induced changes of well-learned adult behavior such as fine adjustment of speech production in adults.

描述（由申请人提供）：幼鸟在发育的关键时期从成年导师那里学习产生复杂的发声（歌曲），就像人类婴儿从父母那里学习说话一样。由于歌曲学习关键取决于一个离散的和专门的基底神经节丘脑皮层电路称为前脑通路（AFP），鸣禽提供了一个伟大的和难得的机会，研究基础的机制，基底神经节依赖学习的复杂运动技能在早期的生活。研究歌曲学习机制的主要障碍之一是行为的复杂性。幼鸟通过改变许多声学和时间特征，逐渐从类似于人类牙牙学语的非结构化和高度可变的发声中发展出它们的歌声。这种高度复杂的学习使得很难检查神经结构和行为活动的精确功能。最近的研究已经通过使用更简单的成人歌曲学习克服了这一困难，这是使用具有厌恶刺激的操作性条件反射范式实验诱导的，并且针对歌曲的特定特征（例如，歌曲的特定部分的音高）。尽管这些研究已经揭示了AFP在成人歌曲学习中的重要功能，但对于更复杂的、自我驱动的少年歌曲学习是否也具有同样的功能，仍然是未知的。事实上，最近的一些发现，包括我自己的初步数据，甚至提出了这样一种可能性，即青少年的歌曲学习在机制上与成年人有很大的不同。因此，研究成人歌曲学习的结果是否普遍适用于青少年歌曲学习是至关重要的理解歌曲学习的机制，无论哪种方式的答案将是一个重大的进展，在鸟鸣研究领域。本建议专门针对这个问题，直接比较几个方面的AFP的功能，在少年歌曲学习与成人歌曲学习以前报道。要做到这一点，我将使用新的行为操纵青少年学习，使我们能够精确地分析相同的功能，青少年的歌曲在成人歌曲学习（音高和序列）的分析，从而使我们能够检查AFP的功能，以同样的方式在成人学习的研究。本研究不仅验证了成年鸣禽是否能为研究幼年鸣禽歌唱学习机制提供一个可靠的模型，而且还表明，利用有针对性的学习操作，对幼年鸣禽的歌唱学习机制也能进行详细的分析，这为鸣禽声乐学习机制的研究提供了一个新的、强有力的途径。此外，这项研究有可能揭示年轻动物复杂运动技能的自我驱动，年龄依赖性发展（如人类婴儿的语言习得）和简单的，训练诱导的成熟成人行为变化（如成人语言产生的微调）之间的神经机制差异。