Biology subjects

Puzerey, P. A.

Publications and source records attributed to Puzerey, P. A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2020

Movement signaling in ventral pallidum and dopaminergic midbrain is gated by behavioral state in singing birds

Movement-related neuronal discharge in ventral tegmental area (VTA) and ventral pallidum (VP) is inconsistently observed across studies. One possibility is that some neurons are movement-related and others are not. Another possibility is that the precise behavioral conditions matter - that a single neuron can be movement related under certain behavioral states but not others. We recorded single VTA and VP neurons in birds transitioning between singing and non-singing states, while monitoring body movement with microdrive-mounted accelerometers. Many VP and VTA neurons exhibited body movement-locked activity exclusively when the bird was not singing. During singing, VP and VTA neurons could switch off their tuning to body movement and become instead precisely time-locked to specific song syllables. These changes in neuronal tuning occurred rapidly at state boundaries. Our findings show that movement-related activity in limbic circuits can be gated by behavioral context. Significance statementNeural signals in the limbic system have long been known to represent body movements as well as reward. Here we show that single neurons dramatically change their tuning to movements when a bird starts to sing.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Dopamine neurons change their tuning according to courtship context in singing birds

How does courtship affect dopaminergic (DA) responses to reward and motor performance outcomes? We used electrophysiology and fiber photometry to record DA signals in two mesostriatal pathways as thirsty male songbirds sang alone and to females. When alone, water reward signals were observed globally but singing-related performance error signals were restricted to a song-specialized mesostriatal pathway. During courtship singing, DA responses to both water-predicting cues and song performance outcomes diminished, and DA signals in the song pathway were instead driven by female calls timed with the male song. Thus DA signals are dynamically gated and routed through distinct pathways as animals change their priorities in response to a courtship opportunity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

A circuit motif in the songbird basal ganglia for computing predicted performance quality

Ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine neurons signal prediction error, the difference between actual and predicted outcome, but it remains unclear how error is computed. Here we identify in songbirds a ventral basal ganglia (vBG) region that is required for song learning and that sends prediction error signals to VTA. During singing, vBG neurons heterogeneously encoded song timing, auditory error, predicted error, and the difference between the two (prediction error). Viral tracing revealed inputs to vBG from auditory and vocal motor thalamus, auditory and vocal motor cortex, and VTA. Our findings reveal a classic actor-critic circuit motif in which a ventral critic learns the prediction component of a prediction error signal that is relayed by VTA to a dorsal actor (the vocal motor BG nucleus Area X). A circuit motif for computing reward prediction error can compute predicted performance quality during motor sequence learning.

neuroscience↗