Although some of the mechanisms of these two forms of learning may overlap (e.g., Law and Gold, 2008), the observed differences suggest that other mechanisms may be unique due to differing functional requirements. A methodological difference between our study and that of Gu et al. (2011) is that we used anesthetized animals while Gu and colleagues used awake animals. We think it is highly unlikely that anesthesia could account for the differences between our results for two reasons. First, while noise correlations can, in principle, be influenced by fluctuations in the depth of anesthesia, they can also be influenced by internal factors in awake animals, such as

fluctuations in alertness, SCH 900776 cell line attention, or motivation. Consistently, differences in noise correlation measurements between studies may be more likely to result from factors

such as differences in the mean firing rate or the size of the temporal analysis window, than by differences in anesthetic (Cohen and Kohn, 2011), although more data are necessary. Second, and most important, even if anesthesia did influence the correlations we measured, this influence would apply Kinase Inhibitor Library equally to all three motif classes because our presentation of motifs during electrophysiology was fully randomized and all of our comparisons are within pairs (or populations) of neurons. In addition, we note that song-evoked responses in the starling forebrain are qualitatively quite similar between anesthetized and unanesthetized states, although some quantitative differences exist (Knudsen and Gentner, 2013; Meliza et al., 2010).

The most parsimonious explanation for our results, however, is that learning induces long-lasting changes Chlormezanone to the neural circuitry that remain after training has concluded, even under anesthesia. The commonly observed positive relationship between signal and noise correlations is often accounted for by shared inputs that provide both signal and noise. In primary visual cortex, neurons that share receptive field properties are more likely to share thalamocortical afferent inputs (Alonso et al., 2001; Michalski et al., 1983). But a negative relationship would require a decorrelation of similarly tuned neurons and an increase in the correlation of dissimilarly tuned neurons. Simple feedforward inhibition circuits could, in theory, support both requirements. Recent modeling work has demonstrated that correlated noise in excitatory and inhibitory input can cancel each other, leading to decorrelated network states (Middleton et al., 2012; Renart et al., 2010). Complementary circuitry in which only excitatory inputs are correlated could preserve correlated noise in dissimilarly tuned neurons (Figure S4).