Meeting Abstract
Individual performance in cognitive and learning tasks has been shown to correlate with attributes of the central nervous system, including neural morphology and function. However, it is essentially unknown whether cognitive or learning performance scales with the electrophysiological properties of individual neurons. Here, we address this interface by characterizing both learning accuracy and neurophysiology in a cohort of hand-reared swamp sparrows, Melospiza georgiana. We report the discovery, in the sensorimotor nucleus HVC, of ‘bridge’ neurons that simultaneously and selectively represent two critical learning-related schemas: the bird’s own song, and the single tutor model from which that song was copied. Strikingly, both the prevalence and response properties of bridge neurons closely predict the accuracy of tutor song copying on a per-individual basis. Moreover, the spike waveform kinetics of bridge neurons are consistent with a corticostriatal projection neuron phenotype. Our findings indicate that accurate imitative learning depends on a successful bridge between the representation of learning models and their sensorimotor copies within single cortical neurons.
