From singing birds to navigating birds: how does the avian brain encode behaviors

Birds and mammals are evolutionary separated for more than 300 million years. However, research on avian neuroscience has revealed that the avian brain is an excellent model to understand a variety of human social and cognitive behaviors. In my talk I will discuss two aspects of such behavior: courtship and navigation. First, I will describe a neural circuit we found in male zebra finch brain that enables them to coordinate their learned and innate motor programs for the successful production of a holistic courtship behavior. Imaging and manipulating neurons in this circuit, together with audio and video analysis, show that during behavior this circuit drives the transition from innate to learned vocalizations, important for successful courtship. These results show how a brain region important to reproduction in both birds and mammals coordinates learned vocalizations with innate, ancestral courtship behaviors.  In the second part of my talk, I will discuss preliminary findings on spatial coding in the brain of the Japanese quail. We combine neural activity recording using a cutting-edge electrophysiological technology and deep-learning based video processing methods in freely foraging quails. We found the existence of head-direction cells in the quail’s brain, which are thought to be the basis for the sense of direction, hence crucial for navigation and spatial memory.