Neural and behavioral mechanisms of song learning in zebra finches

项目总结

Project Summary Many of our most impressive skills, such as those supporting extreme athletic talent or precise musical expression, are learned by imitating the skilled performance of a tutor. To successfully imitate a tutor, a pupil must generate a range of behaviors, evaluate them relative to an example of the tutor, and then reinforce those that are similar to that example. The generated behaviors are often highly elaborate and produced without any source of comparison other than the pupil's internal template. As such, imitative learning depends intimately on the pupil's ability to evaluate and reinforce its own performance in the absence of any extrinsic reward or instruction. The brain mechanisms that support imitative learning remain poorly understood, although it is well known that the basal ganglia (BG) play a central role in classical forms of reinforcement learning. How the BG evaluates and reinforces behavioral variants over the course of imitative learning remains uncertain. In my research I will characterize the relationship between neural activity in the BG, behavioral exploration, and reinforcement during imitative learning. My Specific Aims are: 1) To model the imitative learning process by which songbirds explore subsyllabic structure within song. 2) To jointly model vocal variability and BG circuit activity during song learning. Aim 1 will advance our understanding of the behavioral mechanisms of vocal learning and develop computational frameworks for understanding complex learning processes, while Aim 2 will relate neural variability in the BG to vocal variability during these learning processes. The analyses and models I create in this proposal will both provide insight into the song learning process in zebra finches and create a more general framework for studying complex skill learning. I will conduct this research under the supervision of Drs. John Pearson and Richard Mooney, a team of accomplished, interdisciplinary mentors with complementary skillsets. Their collaboration has already proven to be fruitful. I will work closely with members of the Mooney lab to hone our scientific questions, refine our experimental design, and develop our analyses. In doing so I will build a balanced set of theoretical and experimental skills. I bring a deep passion for understanding complex behavior on both behavioral and neural scales, in addition to expertise in behavioral and computational methods. The experience I gain from this proposal will make me a competitive and independent investigator, accelerating me towards my long-term goal of obtaining a faculty position at a research institute.