Different mechanisms are responsible for dishabituation of electrophysiological auditory responses to a change in acoustic identity than to a change in stimulus location.
Abstract
Repeated exposure to an auditory stimulus leads to habituation of the electrophysiological
and immediate-early-gene (IEG) expression response in the auditory system. A novel
auditory stimulus reinstates this response in a form of dishabituation. This has been
interpreted as the start of new memory formation for this novel stimulus. Changes
in the location of an otherwise identical auditory stimulus can also dishabituate
the IEG expression response. This has been interpreted as an integration of stimulus
identity and stimulus location into a single auditory object, encoded in the firing
patterns of the auditory system. In this study, we further tested this hypothesis.
Using chronic multi-electrode arrays to record multi-unit activity from the auditory
system of awake and behaving zebra finches, we found that habituation occurs to repeated
exposure to the same song and dishabituation with a novel song, similar to that described
in head-fixed, restrained animals. A large proportion of recording sites also showed
dishabituation when the same auditory stimulus was moved to a novel location. However,
when the song was randomly moved among 8 interleaved locations, habituation occurred
independently of the continuous changes in location. In contrast, when 8 different
auditory stimuli were interleaved all from the same location, a separate habituation
occurred to each stimulus. This result suggests that neuronal memories of the acoustic
identity and spatial location are different, and that allocentric location of a stimulus
is not encoded as part of the memory for an auditory object, while its acoustic properties
are. We speculate that, instead, the dishabituation that occurs with a change from
a stable location of a sound is due to the unexpectedness of the location change,
and might be due to different underlying mechanisms than the dishabituation and separate
habituations to different acoustic stimuli.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Attentional modulationDishabituation
Song habituation
Spatial location
Surprise
Zebra finch
Acoustic Stimulation
Animals
Auditory Perception
Female
Finches
Habituation, Psychophysiologic
Memory
Sound Localization
Vocalization, Animal
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/11201Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.nlm.2013.08.010Publication Info
Smulders, Tom V; & Jarvis, Erich D (2013). Different mechanisms are responsible for dishabituation of electrophysiological auditory
responses to a change in acoustic identity than to a change in stimulus location.
Neurobiol Learn Mem, 106. pp. 163-176. 10.1016/j.nlm.2013.08.010. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/11201.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Erich David Jarvis
Adjunct Professor in the Deptartment of Neurobiology
Dr. Jarvis' laboratory studies the neurobiology of vocal communication. Emphasis is
placed on the molecular pathways involved in the perception and production of learned
vocalizations. They use an integrative approach that combines behavioral, anatomical,
electrophysiological and molecular biological techniques. The main animal model used
is songbirds, one of the few vertebrate groups that evolved the ability to learn vocalizations.
The generality of the discoveries is tested in other vocal lear

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