Coulter Austin, Prather Jonathan F
Program in Neuroscience, Department of Zoology and Physiology, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, United States.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jan 14;15:1490858. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1490858. eCollection 2024.
The process of decision making is a complex procedure influenced by both external and internal conditions. Songbirds provide an excellent model to investigate the neural mechanisms of decision making, because females rely on acoustic signals called songs as important stimuli in directing their mate choice. Previous experiments by our group and others have implicated secondary auditory brain sites in female evaluation of song quality, including the caudal portions of the nidopallium (NC) and mesopallium (CM). Recent pathway tracing experiments reveal a convergence of those sites onto a third region, the ventral portion of the intermediate arcopallium (AIV), suggesting that AIV may also play an important role in song evaluation and mate choice. Here we combined behavioral testing with lesion inactivation to investigate the role of AIV in song preference of female Bengalese finches (). Inactivation of AIV was associated with destabilization of rank ordering of song preferences. These data suggest a model in which the convergence of auditory activity in AIV plays an important role in female perception of song quality and production of courtship behaviors. Together with previous results that also demonstrate a role for the auditory areas that converge onto AIV, these findings extend the experimental tractability of this emerging animal model of sensory perception and decision making.
决策过程是一个受外部和内部条件影响的复杂程序。鸣禽为研究决策的神经机制提供了一个极佳的模型，因为雌性鸣禽依靠被称为歌声的声学信号作为指导其配偶选择的重要刺激因素。我们团队和其他团队之前的实验表明，次级听觉脑区参与了雌性对歌声质量的评估，包括巢皮质（NC）和中脑皮质（CM）的尾部区域。最近的通路追踪实验揭示，这些脑区汇聚到第三个区域，即中间脑皮质腹侧部（AIV），这表明AIV在歌声评估和配偶选择中可能也发挥着重要作用。在这里，我们将行为测试与损伤失活相结合，以研究AIV在雌性 Bengalese 雀（）歌声偏好中的作用。AIV失活与歌声偏好等级排序的不稳定有关。这些数据表明了一种模型，即AIV中的听觉活动汇聚在雌性对歌声质量的感知和求偶行为的产生中起着重要作用。连同之前同样证明汇聚到AIV的听觉区域作用的结果，这些发现扩展了这种新兴的感官感知和决策动物模型的实验可操作性。
