After performing EMD to 6 fly traces of 20000 data points (that is 1000 sec flight) for each group (tntXwtb; c105;c232>tnt; c105;c232Xwtb). This data size was chosen to reduce computing time of the SMAP procedure. The EMD decomposes the trace into different time scales in nonstationary data. It seems that the nonlinear behavior occurs at the first IMF (the fastest time scale) and a bit in the second IMF. The potential conclusion to this is that the behavior of the the fly is only unpredictable at the fast movements whereas slow movements are very predictable. Nevertheless, to be cautious it could be that this fastest timescale is just noise, and that this noise is nonlinear. I would say that there is no difference at any time scale between groups (pay attention to the different ranges in the Y-axes), so the ring neurons R1, R3, R4d do not have any effect.

As a groundtruth I have used the same analysis pipeline for the traces in the uniform arena from Maye et al. 2007. Here the effect is even more pronounced at the fastest time scales. So I will conclude that this is real fly behavior and not noise that is shared among both setups: the Ping pong ball machine and the torquemeter.In order to gain more insights into the underlying flight structure I took one random flight trace to explain a few observations. The x-axis is the theta (that actually goes from 0-4 in steps of 0.2 and therefore we see the 21 points), in the y-axis is the correlation of the prediction to groundtruth. We see that IMF has a bigger slope, but not only that, also that its prediction correlation is around 0.88, whereas lower timescales prediction is basically perfect. That is, fast time scales are not only more nonlinear but also less unpredictable. This pattern is repeated in every fly measured

To have an impression of how these IMF resultant traces look like: IMF1, IMF2 and IMF8