The threshold to escape white-noise feedback was dynamically updated based on the bird’s performance over the

last 200 renditions of the target. If the fraction of escapes exceeded 80%, the threshold was automatically adjusted to the bird’s mean in those last 200 renditions, but the adjustment Cobimetinib ic50 was only made in the direction of learning. We chose target syllables with well-defined pitch (i.e., harmonic stacks) that were reliably (>80%) detected. Pitch was computed on a 5 ms sound segment of the target syllable using an algorithm fitting different sets of harmonics (see Supplemental Experimental Procedures). We computed pitch either at the very start of the syllable or 15–50 ms into it (varied between birds but constant within a bird). Online estimates of targeted segment durations used threshold crossings of the smoothed (5 ms boxcar filter with 1 ms advancement) amplitude envelope. The threshold was set to ∼2×–10× the background noise levels and kept constant throughout an experiment. Syllable onsets are associated with rapid increases in amplitude, which makes the estimates of their timing more robust to noise. Thus, we mostly targeted “syllable + gap” segments and estimated the target duration from the onset of the target syllable to the onset of the following syllable. However, in one bird, we made white noise conditional selleck screening library on the duration of a syllable, with the additional contingency that

the subsequent gap duration not change significantly. In four additional birds, we targeted intersyllable gaps (offset of last syllable to onset of next syllable). These five birds were pooled with the rest because they produced similar effects in response to experimental manipulations (e.g., lesions). The design for birds that underwent pCAF and tCAF both before and after lesions was as follows: one group did a continuous block of pCAF for at least 6 days, followed by at least a week of no CAF. This was followed by a continuous block of tCAF for at least 6 days. The birds then underwent surgery

for lesions and were given at least 1 week to recover before repeating the pCAF and tCAF blocks in the same order. Another group of birds experienced the same protocol but with the order reversed (tCAF followed science by pCAF). Because pCAF was impaired after Area X lesions, we wanted to rule out potential short-term effects of lesions on learning. We thus ran pCAF for two birds more than 4 weeks after lesion to confirm abolished learning. We typically exposed birds to CAF for the same number of days before and after lesion and targeted the same song segment. Some birds experienced either tCAF or pCAF only, in which cases we did at least one round of CAF (in both directions). See main text for details of sample sizes for the various experiments. In a subset of birds, we conducted spontaneous return-to-baseline experiments before and after Area X lesions (Figure 6).