TY - JOUR
T1 - A mesocortical dopamine circuit enables the cultural transmission of vocal behaviour
AU - Tanaka, Masashi
AU - Sun, Fangmiao
AU - Li, Yulong
AU - Mooney, Richard
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank J. Hatfield for constructing AAV2/9-CAG-GRABDA1h; S. Nowicki, S. Peters, C. Sturdy, F. Wang and S. Soderling for critical discussion and for reading earlier versions of this manuscript. This work was supported by JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research Abroad (M.T.), the National Basic Research Program of China 973 Program Grant 2015CB856402 (Y.L.), the American BRAIN Initiative project 1U01NS103558-01 (Y.L.), NIH Grant 1R01-NS-099288 (R.M.) and NSF IOS-1354962 (R.M.).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2018/11/1
Y1 - 2018/11/1
N2 - The cultural transmission of behaviour depends on the ability of the pupil to identify and emulate an appropriate tutor1–4. 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 speaker5,6, 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 the pupil during tutoring blocked copying, whereas pairing stimulation of periaqueductal grey terminals in the HVC with a song played through a speaker was sufficient to drive copying. Exposure to a singing tutor triggered the rapid emergence of responses to the tutor song in the HVC of the pupil and a rapid increase in the complexity of the song of the pupil, an early signature of song copying7,8. These findings reveal that a dopaminergic mesocortical circuit detects the presence of a tutor and helps to encode the performance of the tutor, facilitating the cultural transmission of vocal behaviour.
AB - The cultural transmission of behaviour depends on the ability of the pupil to identify and emulate an appropriate tutor1–4. 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 speaker5,6, 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 the pupil during tutoring blocked copying, whereas pairing stimulation of periaqueductal grey terminals in the HVC with a song played through a speaker was sufficient to drive copying. Exposure to a singing tutor triggered the rapid emergence of responses to the tutor song in the HVC of the pupil and a rapid increase in the complexity of the song of the pupil, an early signature of song copying7,8. These findings reveal that a dopaminergic mesocortical circuit detects the presence of a tutor and helps to encode the performance of the tutor, facilitating the cultural transmission of vocal behaviour.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41586-018-0636-7
DO - 10.1038/s41586-018-0636-7
M3 - Article
C2 - 30333629
AN - SCOPUS:85055812835
VL - 563
SP - 117
EP - 120
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
SN - 0028-0836
IS - 7729
ER -