Figure 3. Example neural responses from a control bird and a wn-reared bird to a subset of the selectivity stimuli.

Spectrographic representation of exemplars of a subset of stimulus types (Con, Pips, Tones, WN) and corresponding neural responses for 2 recording sites, one from a control adult (top) recorded in L1 and the other from a wn-reared bird recorded in L3 (bottom). Note that sound begins at 0.5 s. For the neural response, both the spike raster for 10 trials (middle) and the PSTH (denoted by spikes/s on the bottom) are shown. These examples were chosen to reflect the characteristics in the average neural responses in control adults versus wn-reared adults: the recording site from the control adult shows robust responses to Con and WN, whereas the recording site from the wn-reared adult shows decreased responses to Con and enhanced responses to Tones. In this example, as in the average data, the wn-reared recording site was more variable (Con FF = 1.16 and Pip FF = 1.40) than the control recording site (Con FF = 0.91 and Pip FF = 0.91). While these responses were chosen as illustrative of the average neural responses, we also found a wide range of response properties, including neurons in wn-reared animals that showed strong and reliable responses to song (as shown below). The spontaneous background activity was variable across units in both control and wn-reared birds but similar in rate across the two rearing conditions. To conserve space, we omitted showing the response to Ripples.