LHb lesions in adulthood do not impair vocalizations or the ability to produce female-directed song.
A: spectrograms showing pre-lesion lone song for an adult LHb lesion bird (top), 60 days post-lesion lone song (middle), and post-lesion female-directed song for the same bird (bottom). Scale bar: 500 ms. B-C: same as A except for two additional example adult lesion birds. D: the self-imitation score was high for each bird, and there was no significant difference between any of the three groups (n = 3 birds control; n = 5 birds pre- vs. pre-lesion and pre- vs. post-lesion; p = 0.0625, two-sided, paired Wilcoxon sign rank test comparing pre- vs pre-lesion and pre- vs. post-lesion; p = 0.571, two-sided, unpaired Wilcoxon rank sum test comparing pre- vs. post-shamand pre- vs. pre-lesion; p = 0.0714, two-sided, unpaired Wilcoxon rank sum test comparing pre- vs. post-shamand pre- vs post-lesion). E: reconstruction error distribution for all vocalizations. The red vertical line corresponds to the threshold set at 99.9th percentile of pre-lesioned undirected song (test set), which is used to divide the LHb post-lesion undirected data into normal and abnormal vocalizations. LHb pre-lesion undirected (training set: black outline; test set: gray), LHb post-lesion undirected (average: red; individual bird shown in A: pink), and LHb post-lesion female-directed (green) vocalizations. F: average anomaly score for each individual bird across 6 replicate VAEs (n = 3 control; n = 5 lesion undirected; n = 5 lesion female-directed; mean +/- STD shown in dot/vertical line). Groups are not significantly different from each other (Kruskal-Wallis test, p = 0.9139). The outlier observed in the lesion directed group is due to determining the 99.9th percentile with a small sample size. The outlier (green) can be observed in E and Sup Fig 5_1A and C. G: two-dimensional projection of the PC space for the first three components. Top row corresponds to pre- lesion undirected vocalizations (test and training sets), middle row corresponds to post-lesion undirected vocalizations, and bottom corresponds to LHb post-lesion female-directed vocalizations.