Auditory cortical error signals retune during songbird courtship

Abstract

Auditory feedback is important for vocal learning and control, but it remains unclear how the presence of an audience affects neural representations of self-produced sounds. Here we recorded neural activity from the auditory pallium in zebra finches practicing singing alone and directing courtship songs to females. We first discovered that many auditory neurons changed their singing-related discharge patterns during courtship singing. We used syllable-targeted distorted auditory feedback (DAF) to test how signals related to song feedback distortion depend on courtship context. Though past work showed that dopamine neurons uniformly reduce DAF responses during courtship, pallial auditory neurons exhibited heterogeneous DAF signal re-tuning in the presence of the female. Thus, single neurons in the songbird auditory pallium process feedback from self-produced actions differently when singing alone compared to when singing female-directed courtship song.