Prof. Ana Amador seminar at Gaia building (19/6/2024)

Prof. Ana Amador imparts a seminar the next Wednesday 19th in the Seminar room of Gaia Building.

Ana Amador is a professor at the Physics Department of the School of Science at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, since 2018. She is also a Research Associate at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET) since 2013. Ana is a theoretical-experimental physicist-neuroscientist and her research interests are biomechanics, neurophysiology, neuroethology, non-linear dynamics and, in a more specific area, the production and perception of vocalizations in songbirds.

The title for the seminar is "Low dimensional neural dynamics underlying the generation of rhythmic vocal behavior in canaries" and the abstract is the following:

Singing is a complex motor activity that emerges from the interaction between
the central and peripheral nervous systems, with the body and the environment. The
similarities between birdsong and human speech, both in production and learning,
have positioned songbirds as highly useful animal models to study this learned motor
skill.
In this talk I will show an interdisciplinary approach to study the emergence of
rhythmic vocal behavior. Specifically I will present neuronal recordings in a
telencephalic region where sensori-motor integration occurs, showing the presence of
well-defined oscillations in local field potentials, which are synchronized to the song
rhythms of adult male canaries (Serinus canaria). Moreover, using machine learning
techniques to study the underlying structure in multi-unit recordings, we find a low
dimensional representation that is related with behavior. Our results demonstrate a
tight link between peripheral and central dynamical patterns of activity during singing.