Stephanie White: UCLA

Humans and songbirds learn their vocalizations through social interactions and sensorimotor experience. These processes enlist implicit learning, a critical component of social cognition. Deficits in implicit learning including language disorders have devastating consequences for social integration and well-being. To treat or prevent these deficits, the neural mechanisms for learned vocal communication must be understood. Songbirds are one of the few animal models in which one can study the language subcomponent comprised by socially-learned vocal communication because, like humans but unlike rodents or non-human primates, they learn a significant portion of their vocalizations. They do so in a manner that exhibits key parallels to speech development and maintenance. Parallels include reliance on critical periods, cortico-basal ganglia circuitry, ongoing auditory inputs, hormonal factors and genes such as the forkhead transcription factor known as FoxP2. Using behavioral paradigms, we found that songbirds actively regulate their own levels of FoxP2 within area X, the basal ganglia sub-region dedicated to vocal learning. We paired this ethological approach with modern systems analytic techniques and found that singing activates distinct ensembles of gene expression in area X that are not similarly co-activated in adjacent tissue comprised of similar cell types. Thus, ‘molecular microcircuitry’ exists alongside anatomic and synaptic microcircuitry that, together, functionally specify the brain, in this case, for vocal learning. Behavior-linked regulation of this molecular microcircuitry appears critical for vocal learning.