Cynthia Moss

About

Cynthia F. Moss is a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in Neuroscience and Mechanical Engineering. She directs the Comparative Neural Systems and Behavior Laboratory, also known as the Bat Lab. Moss received her B.S. (summa cum laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her Ph.D. from Brown University. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Tübingen in Germany and a Research Fellow at Brown University before joining Harvard University, where she received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award and was named the Morris Kahn Associate Professor. She also received the National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. Later, she moved to the University of Maryland, serving as a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Systems Research, and was recognized with the University of Maryland Regents Faculty Award for Research and Creativity in 2010. In 2014, Moss joined Johns Hopkins University, engaging in teaching and research collaborations across multiple schools. Her research investigates how the brain represents dynamic sensory information from the natural environment, focusing on sensory coding, spatial perception, attention, learning, memory, and adaptive motor control. Her laboratory studies echolocating bats, capturing natural behaviors through high-speed audio and video recordings, and conducting wireless neural recordings from free-flying bats to understand…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Computer vision
• Biology
• Cognitive science
• Physics
• Communication

Selected publications

• Echolocating bats accumulate information from acoustic snapshots to predict auditory object motion

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Unlike other predators that use vision as their primary sensory system, bats compute the three-dimensional (3D) position of flying insects from discrete echo snapshots, which raises questions about the strategies they employ to track and intercept erratically moving prey from interrupted sensory information. Here, we devised an ethologically inspired behavioral paradigm to directly test the hypothesis that echolocating bats build internal prediction models from dynamic acoustic stimuli to antici…

  DOI

• Communication with self, friends and foes in active-sensing animals

  Journal of Experimental Biology · 2021 · 37 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Animals that rely on electrolocation and echolocation for navigation and prey detection benefit from sensory systems that can operate in the dark, allowing them to exploit sensory niches with few competitors. Active sensing has been characterized as a highly specialized form of communication, whereby an echolocating or electrolocating animal serves as both the sender and receiver of sensory information. This characterization inspires a framework to explore the functions of sensory channels that…

  DOI

• Orienting our view of the superior colliculus: specializations and general functions

  Current Opinion in Neurobiology · 2021 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Bats as instructive animal models for studying longevity and aging

  Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2024-10-04 · 24 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Bats (order Chiroptera) are emerging as instructive animal models for aging studies. Unlike some common laboratory species, they meet a central criterion for aging studies: they live for a long time in the wild or in captivity, for 20, 30, and even >40 years. Healthy aging (i.e., healthspan) in bats has drawn attention to their potential to improve the lives of aging humans due to bat imperviousness to viral infections, apparent low rate of tumorigenesis, and unique ability to repair DNA. At the…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Superfast Lombard response in free-flying, echolocating bats

  Current Biology · 2024-05-13 · 14 citations

  articleOpen access

  Acoustic cues are crucial to communication, navigation, and foraging in many animals, which hence face the problem of detecting and discriminating these cues in fluctuating noise levels from natural or anthropogenic sources. Such auditory dynamics are perhaps most extreme for echolocating bats that navigate and hunt prey on the wing in darkness by listening for weak echo returns from their powerful calls in complex, self-generated umwelts. 1 Griffin D.R. Listening in the Dark: The Acoustic Orien…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01EB004750

  NIH · $1.3M · 2009

• NIH Grant T32MH020048

  NIH · $749k · 2007

• Active Sensing for Three-Dimensional Auditory Localization

  NSF · $357k · 2001–2005

Frequent coauthors

• James A. Simmons

  Providence College

  72 shared

• Megan S. Ballard

  The University of Texas at Austin

  54 shared

• Richard W. Carlson

  Planetary Science Institute

  49 shared

• Marilyn L. Fogel

  University of California System

  49 shared

• Jennifer Heisinger

  Princeton University

  49 shared

• Anna K. Behrensmeyer

  National Museum of Natural History

  49 shared

• Paul L. Koch

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  49 shared

• Michael J. Ferragamo

  39 shared

Labs

• Psychological & Brain SciencesPI

Education

• Ph.D., Experimental Psychology

  Brown University

  1985

• B.S. summa cum laude, Psychology and Zoology

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  1979

Awards & honors

• National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award
• University of Maryland Regents Faculty Award for Research an…
• Hartmann Award in Auditory Neuroscience (2017)
• James McKeen Cattell Award (2018)
• Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize (2019)

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

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• Michela Gallagherh-104
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