| Date | Time | Location | What |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday, 11 June 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Carl Gold (CNS grad student) talks about machine learning with Support Vector Machines. |
| Tuesday, 4 June 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Eat pizza and reply to high-school students' questions about the CNSE video. |
| Tuesday, 28 May 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Special guest: Emily Lakdawalla from the Pasadena Planetary Society. |
| Tuesday, 21 May 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Adam Hayes will be giving his defense talk a test ride. |
| Tuesday, 14 May 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Good food; good talk (about good old automatic automatic patent generator generator, of course). |
| Tuesday, 7 May 2002 | noon | NOTE ROOM CHANGE: Moore 139 | Sushi?!? Anthony Leonardo (Konishi Lab) will discuss one of the topics from his recent thesis defense: An efference copy may be used to maintain the stability of adult birdsong. |
| Tuesday, 30 April 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Sushi! And discuss the date for the laser tag party donated by Rachel Zimmerman. |
| Tuesday, 23 April 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Dr. Zhiwen Liu (postdoc in Psaltis group) talks about the femtosecond camera |
| Tuesday, 16 April 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | luncheon meeting/no speaker |
| Tuesday, 9 April 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | luncheon meeting/no speaker |
| Tuesday, 2 April 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Dr. Gabriel Kreiman (former Koch lab member)talks about his experiences at Novartis |
| Tuesday, 19 March 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Caltech Prof. Ken Pickar (of E103, E105, and E106 fame) talks about entrepreneurship |
| Tuesday, 26 Feb 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | Fred Farina (from Caltech's Office of Technology Transfer) talks about the patent process |
| Tuesday, 19 Feb 2002 | noon | Moore 239 | our trailblazing no-speaker-scheduled-for-this-week meeting! |
An efference copy may be used to maintain the stability of adult
birdsong
Anthony Leonardo
Konishi Lab
Zebra finches use auditory feedback to both learn and maintain their songs (Konishi, 1965; Leonardo & Konishi, 1999). Nucleus LMAN of the anterior neostriatum is believed to be crucial for these processes, and is thought to convey an error-correction signal to the motor control system based on the degree of match between the bird's vocalizations and a memorized song template (Brainard & Doupe, 2000a). Here we measure the activity of individual LMAN neurons while simultaneously manipulating the auditory feedback that birds hear during singing, thus controlling the level of error they can detect in their songs. LMAN neurons were found produce spikes locked with millisecond precision to specific acoustic features in individual song syllables. This timing precision is comparable to that seen the motor control neurons that generate the song itself (Chi & Margoliash, 2001). Furthermore, perturbation of the auditory feedback heard by singing birds had no effect on LMAN spike patterns, suggesting that rather than auditory feedback, nucleus LMAN processes an efference copy of the bird's motor commands. These findings cast a new light on the role LMAN plays in the learning and maintenance of the bird's song.