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Dryad

Data from: Consistent coordination patterns provide near perfect behavior decoding in a comprehensive motor program for insect flight

Abstract

Precise spike timing encoding is present in many motor systems, but is not frequently utilized to decode behavior or to examine how coordination is achieved across many motor units. Furthermore, testing whether the same coordinated sets of muscles control different movements is difficult without a complete motor representation at the level of the currency of control – action potentials. Here, we demonstrate nearly perfect decoding of six hawk moth flight behavior states elicited in response to wide-field drifting visual stimuli about the flight axes – pitch, roll, and yaw – using a comprehensive, spike-resolved motor program. A simple linear decoding pipeline is sufficient to predict behavior, but only if precise timing information in included. We also demonstrate that as few as half the muscles can be used to retain this near perfect decoding performance, linking coordination to redundancy in encoding across the entire moth flight motor program. We then use this comprehensive motor representation to test if muscle covariation present in one pair of visual stimulus conditions can be used to decode behavior in a different pair of visual stimulus conditions. We find conserved muscle coordination patterns at the level of motor unit spike timings in these functionally distinct behaviors.