Neural Evolution of Context-Dependent Fly Song

Fly Courtship Song: Triggering the Light Fantastic

In a study in this issue, Clyne and Miesenböck (2008) apply an ingenious optogenetic technology to activate neurons that generate male-specific courtship song in flies. This work sheds new light on the neural circuitry underlying sexually dimorphic behaviors in Drosophila.

Context-dependent representation in recurrent neural networks

In order to assess the short-term memory performance of non-linear random neural networks, we introduce a measure to quantify the dependence of a neural representation upon the past context. We study this measure both numerically and theoretically using the mean-field theory for random neural networks, showing the existence of an optimal level of synaptic weights heterogeneity. We further inves...

Generating smooth context-dependent neural representations

In many cognitive situations context is speci ed glob ally encompassing the entire duration of an episode but explicitly identi ed only at its initiation Examples of such contexts are social situations spatial environ ments task speci cations etc In many such cases a neural system needs to respond di erently to the same immediate stimulus depending on the global context Clearly the system must ...

Context-Dependent Changes to Song Variability Lesions of an Avian Basal Ganglia Circuit Prevent

Lesions of an avian basal ganglia circuit prevent context-dependent changes to song variability.

Trial-by-trial variability is important in feedback-based motor learning. Variation in motor output enables evaluation mechanisms to differentially reinforce patterns of motor activity that produce desired behaviors. Here, we studied neural substrates of variability in the performance of adult birdsong, a complex, learned motor skill used for courtship. Song performance is more variable when ma...