A mesocortical dopamine circuit enables the cultural transmission of vocal behaviour.

ABSTRACT: The cultural transmission of behaviour depends on the ability of the pupil to identify and emulate an appropriate tutor^1-4. How the brain of the pupil detects a suitable tutor and encodes the behaviour of the tutor is largely unknown. Juvenile zebra finches readily copy the songs of the adult tutors that they interact with, but not the songs that they listen to passively through a speaker^5,6, indicating that social cues generated by the tutor facilitate song imitation. Here we show that neurons in the midbrain periaqueductal grey of juvenile finches are selectively excited by a singing tutor and-by releasing dopamine in the cortical song nucleus HVC-help to encode the song representations of the tutor used for vocal copying. Blocking dopamine signalling in the HVC of

SUBMITTER: Tanaka M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6219627 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature