Mutual Information Analysis Reveals Millisecond Level Precision Across Flight Muscles in Manduca sexta

Motor control has long been thought to be primarily encoded in spike rate, however recent work has highlighted the importance of spike timing. Despite possessing a good understanding of spike timing precision in sensory systems, the same understanding has not been established for their motor counterparts. We utilize EMG and motor output recordings from the flight system of the hawkmoth Manduca sexta to characterize the level of spike timing precision in the motor system. We show through two complementary information theoretic methods, including a novel noise corruption method, that the scale of temporal precision in all muscle activations is on the millisecond-scale, comparable to many sensory systems. Additionally, we establish that the novel method is capable of resolving precise precision values in systems that traditional methods struggle to characterize. This indicates that this precision must arise within the circuit.Undergraduat