Auditory cortical error signals retune during songbird courtship

Auditory feedback is important for vocal learning and control, but it remains unclear how the presence of an audience affects neural representations of self-produced sounds. Here we recorded neural activity in a primary auditory cortical area, Field L, in zebra finches practicing singing alone and directing courtship songs to females. We first discovered that many Field L neurons changed their singing-related discharge patterns during courtship singing, even though the auditory feedback from the birds own song was similar. We next used syllable-targeted distorted auditory feedback (DAF) to test how auditory error signals depend on courtship context. Though past work showed that dopamine neurons uniformly reduce error signaling during courtship, Field L neurons exhibited heterogeneous error signal re-tuning in the presence of the female. Thus, single neurons in a primary sensory area process feedback from self-produced actions differently during practice and performance.