Stable Sequential Activity Underlying the Maintenance of a Precisely Executed Skilled Behavior

By Kalman A. Katlowitz, Michel A. Picardo, M. A. Long. 2018

69 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY A vast array of motor skills can be maintained throughout life. Do these behaviors require stability of individual neuron tuning or can the output of a given circuit remain constant despite fluctuations in single cells? This question is difficult to address due to the variability inherent in most motor actions studied in the laboratory. A notable exception, however, is the courtship song of the adult zebra finch, which is a learned, highly precise motor act mediated by orderly dynamics within premotor neurons of the forebrain. By longitudinally tracking the activity of excitatory projection neurons during singing using two-photon calcium imaging, we find that both the number and precise timing of song-related spiking events remain nearly identical over the span of several weeks to months. These findings demonstrate that learned, complex behaviors can be stabilized by maintaining precise and invariant tuning at the level of single neurons.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

How researchers see this paper

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Ta-Chu Kao
2. Kristopher T. Jensen
3. Guillaume Hennequin
4. Gido M. van de Ven
5. Alberto Bernacchia

Citations in the corpus

• Natural continual learning: success is a journey, not (just) a destination (2021, background): “In the RNNs, we found that the single-unit representations of a given digit changed during learning of the task involving that digit but stabilized after learning, consistent with work in several distinct biological circuits [6, 11, 16, 20, 34].”