Daniel Pollak

Parsing social context in auditory forebrain of male zebra finches To understand the influence of natural behavioral context on neural activity requires studying awake-behaving animals. Microdrive devices facilitate bridging behavior and physiology to examine neural ...

8/ Want a deeper dive? Check out the full paper at journals.plos.org/plosone/arti.... Happy to chat more about social neural coding or how to implement similar recording gear!

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7/ Tools: Our open-access microdrive design—orchestrating reliable, long-term neural recordings—is freely shared (CaltechDATA repository) for the community to use and build upon.

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6/ Takeaway: NCM isn’t sensitive to whether it’s the bird singing or hearing itself—but it is sensitive to the presence of other birds. Suggests a specialized auditory representation tuned to social environment.

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5/ Key insights:
• Behavioral context (self- vs. external song) → no change in neural encoding
• Social context (alone vs. with conspecifics) → marked modulation in response strength & selectivity
Plus, we observed stimulus-specific local field potential correlates in NCM.

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4/ Our microdrive system is lightweight, durable for months, and broadly accessible—overcoming major hurdles in chronic recordings in small animals.

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3/ We compared two contexts:
• Behavioral – hearing own song vs. actively singing it
• Social – listening while alone vs. in the presence of others
We found that NCM responses remained consistent across behavioral contexts but were changed social listening situations.

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2/ Why zebra finches? They’re highly vocal and social—perfect for studying how neural responses in the auditory cortex (aka caudomedial nidopallium, or NCM) change with behavioral and social context.

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A picture of our microdrive design

1/ Late to the game to publicize my paper with @healeylab.bsky.social ocial: Parsing social context in auditory forebrain of male zebra finches (PLOS ONE, March 19, 2025). We also developed a low-cost microdrive for long-term neural recording in freely behaving finches.

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a man says you know i hate the attention ALT: a man says you know i hate the attention

Wow! Thank you @animal-prattle.bsky.social and @timsainburg.bsky.social for reading this paper and skeeting it up! I haven't even skeeted it myself yet.

10.04.2025 05:48 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0