Analyzing variability in neural responses to complex natural sounds in the awake songbird

Studies of auditory processing in awake, behaving songbirds allow for the possibility of new classes of experiments, including those involving attention and plasticity. Detecting and determining the significance of plasticity, however, requires assessing the intrinsic variability in neural responses. Effects such as rapid plasticity have been investigated in the auditory system through the use of the spectrotemporal receptive field (STRF), a characterization of the properties of sounds to which a neuron best responds. Here we investigated neural response variability in awake recordings obtained from zebra finch field L, the analog of the primary auditory cortex. To quantify the level of variability in the neural recordings, we used three similarity measures: an STRF-based metric, a spike-train correlation-based metric, and a spike-train discrimination-based metric. We then extracted a number of parameters from these measures, quantifying how they fluctuated over time. Our results indicate that 1) awake responses are quite stable over time; 2) the different measures of response are complementary-specifically, the spike-train-based measures yield new information complementary to the STRF; and 3) different STRF parameters show distinct levels of variability. These results provide critical constraints for the design of robust decoding strategies and novel experiments on attention and plasticity in the awake songbird.