social context–induced song variation affects female behavior and gene expression社会context-induced歌曲影响女性的行为和基因表达变化.pdfVIP

PLoS BIOLOGY Social Context–Induced Song Variation Affects Female Behavior and Gene Expression Sarah C. Woolley1*, Allison J. Doupe1,2 1 Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America, 2 Department of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States of America Social cues modulate the performance of communicative behaviors in a range of species, including humans, and such changes can make the communication signal more salient. In songbirds, males use song to attract females, and song organization can differ depending on the audience to which a male sings. For example, male zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) change their songs in subtle ways when singing to a female (directed song) compared with when they sing in isolation (undirected song), and some of these changes depend on altered neural activity from a specialized forebrain-basal ganglia circuit, the anterior forebrain pathway (AFP). In particular, variable activity in the AFP during undirected song is thought to actively enable syllable variability, whereas the lower and less-variable AFP firing during directed singing is associated with more stereotyped song. Consequently, directed song has been suggested to reflect a ‘‘performance’’ state, and undirected song a form of vocal motor ‘‘exploration.’’ However, this hypothesis predicts that directed–undirected song differences, despite their subtlety, should matter to female zebra finches, which is a question that has not been investigated. We tested female preferences for this natural variation in song in a behavioral approach assay, and we found that both mated