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. 2014 Apr 7;111(16):6063–6068. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1317087111

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

LMAN sensorimotor loop delay. (A) Sagittal schematic of the songbird brain. Both HVC and the LMAN project to the premotor RA. DLM, dorsal lateral nucleus of the medial thalamus; nXIIts, hypoglossal nucleus. (B) Electrical stimulation in LMAN using paired 0.2-ms current pulses of 500 µA (separated by 1 ms) during song leads to transient distortions of song syllables (brief pitch decrease, red square bracket) compared with catch trials. (Top) Log-power sound spectrograms (high and low power shown in yellow and black, respectively) of a nonstimulated (catch) syllable and a stimulated (stim) syllable. A stack plot of frequency modulation (FM; Middle) and the mean FM (Bottom) across 488 nonstimulated syllables (catch trials) and 454 stimulated syllables (Stim) reveals a transient FM increase corresponding to a brief pitch decrease (white square bracket in the sound spectrogram) roughly 20 ms (dashed red line) after stimulation onset (time origin, thick red line). (C) Log-power sound spectrogram (Top), raster plot (Middle), and mean firing rate (Bottom) of a LMAN single unit with short auditory latency of 18 ms to playback onset of the bird’s own song (n = 307 playbacks).