Unstable neurons underlie a stable learned behavior

By William A Liberti, J. Markowitz, L. N. Perkins, Derek C. Liberti, D. P. Leman, Grigori Guitchounts, T. Velho, Darrell N. Kotton, Carlos Lois, Timothy J. Gardner. 2016

89 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motor skills can be maintained for decades, but the biological basis of this memory persistence remains largely unknown. The zebra finch, for example, sings a highly stereotyped song that is stable for years, but it is not known whether the precise neural patterns underlying song are stable or shift from day to day. Here we demonstrate that the population of projection neurons coding for song in the premotor nucleus, HVC, change from day to day. The most dramatic shifts occur over intervals of sleep. In contrast to the transient participation of excitatory neurons, ensemble measurements dominated by inhibition persist unchanged even after damage to downstream motor nerves. These observations offer a principle of motor stability: spatiotemporal patterns of inhibition can maintain a stable scaffold for motor dynamics while the population of principal neurons that directly drive behavior shift from one day to the next.

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

Citations in the corpus

• Natural continual learning: success is a journey, not (just) a destination (2021, neutral): “…stability of neural representations with some indicating stable representations (Chestek et al., 2007; Dhawale et al., 2017; Katlowitz et al., 2018; Jensen et al., 2021) and others drifting representations (Liberti et al., 2016; Driscoll et al., 2017; Schoonover et al., 2021; Rokni et al., 2007).”
• Dynamic Reorganization of Neuronal Activity Patterns in Parietal Cortex. (2017, unknown): “Also, a recent study reported a mix of stable and changing features in the activity of HVCduring birdsong (Liberti et al., 2016).”