Singing-Related Activity in Anterior Forebrain of Male Zebra Finches Reflects Courtship Motivation for Target Females
Figure 1
Example unit activity before and during singing directed to paired, nonpaired, and dummy females.
A, Concurrently recorded sound oscillogram (upper traces) and instantaneous firing rate of representative Area X unit taken from epochs including non-singing and singing to either a paired female (upper panels) or a nonpaired female (lower panels). B, Expanded views of sound (upper panels, spectrogram) and neural activity (lower panels, activity waveform) in periods of panel A indicated by orange (paired) and green (nonpaired) color bars, which contain similar singing and non-singing periods for both females. C, Activity of unit during multiple renditions of the characteristic song motif directed to different female classes. Upper spectrogram is a representative song motif. For each successive motif rendition, unit firing time is indicated by vertical tick. Raster of activity during equal duration epochs when male did not sing is indicated by base. D, Average firing rate for each msec of analysis epoch (upper) and variability of firing rate across all renditions to each female class (C.V. = S.D./mean).