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 sensorimotor integration, scene perception, spatial attention, and memory.

Research topics

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

Selected publications

• Bat eye movements resolve a long-standing question in gaze control

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-03-12

  articleOpen access

  Summary Eye movements enable visual information gathering and stabilize gaze via optokinetic (OKR) and vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) pathways. 1 Echolocating bats, despite their rapid and agile flight maneuvers to land upside down and navigate 3D space, have long been thought not to move their eyes, an assumption originating from Walls’s influential assertion over 80 years ago 2 but never tested with empirical measurements. Here we present quantitative analysis of eye movements driven by visual and vestibular signals in Seba’s short-tailed bat ( Carollia perspicillata ). Bats generated robust visually driven OKR with an oculomotor range of ∼±10°, and displayed strong otolith-mediated responses during off-vertical axis rotation. In contrast, they showed minimal semicircular canal–driven angular VOR (aVOR) for passive head rotations that elicit large, sustained responses in mice. Micro-CT reconstructions revealed that bats and mice have similar semicircular canal geometry, indicating that the weak aVOR does not reflect peripheral anatomical constraints. These findings provide the first empirical demonstration that bats make robust eye movements and exhibit strong visual and otolith-driven components of gaze stabilization. We propose that semicircular canal signals may be more strongly engaged during active flight and modulated by behavioral state–dependent tuning of vestibular pathways to support ecologically specialized behaviors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data for "Sparse-to-dense coding transformation between hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1"

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-03-27

  datasetOpen access

  This dataset contains analysis code and data for the figures associated with the paper: 'Sparse-to-dense coding transformation between hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1' S.R. Maimon et al., Nature XXX, YYY (2026) [DOI: ZZZ] The repository contains:- MATLAB code to plot the main figures of the paper: one script for each main figure.- Data for the main figures of the paper, including cell examples as well as histogram data and images: one data file for each main figure. To run the MATLAB code to generate the figures, change the directory of MATLAB to the code directory, and run the scripts.The code was written using MATLAB version 2023a, and was also tested on MATLAB version 2024b. Any questions should be sent to the corresponding author of the paper, Nachum Ulanovsky (nachum.ulanovsky@weizmann.ac.il)

  PublisherDOI

• Bat eye movements resolve a long-standing question in gaze control

  Current Biology · 2026-03-31 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Echolocating bats adjust sonar call features and head/ear position as they track moving targets in the presence of clutter

  The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025-03-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Echolocating bats often encounter clutter as they pursue insect prey. To probe the adaptive behaviors bats employ to mitigate the effects of clutter, this study quantified echolocation call features and head movements of big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) as they tracked a moving prey target in the dark. Bats were trained to rest on a perch and track an approaching target for a food reward. Clutter was positioned at different distances and angular offsets from the bat and the path of a moving target. This study hypothesized that bats dynamically adjust call features and head direction to facilitate target localization in the presence of clutter. The results show that bats shortened call duration and interval and increased head movements when the target was close to clutter. The study also revealed that bats increase the production of sonar strobe groups in cluttered environments, which may sharpen sonar spatial resolution. Spectral analysis showed that maximum call power shifted to lower frequencies when clutter was close to the target. These data demonstrate the big brown bat's range of adaptive behaviors that support target tracking in cluttered environments.

  PublisherDOI

• Sensorimotor dynamics in the superior colliculus of the echolocating bat

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-08-26

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract To successfully execute natural tasks, animals must continuously monitor and integrate dynamic sensory information to guide behavior. While this process – known as active sensing – is fundamental to goal-directed behavior, the mechanisms by which sensory information supports motor planning, particularly across different behavioral contexts, remains poorly understood. We investigated sensory and motor activity in the superior colliculus (SC) of echolocating bats, a powerful model system to study active sensing behaviors due to their reliance on self-generated sonar signals. We recorded multichannel SC activity while bats performed spatial navigation and target tracking behaviors. We hypothesized that changes in sensory signals (i.e., returning echoes) drive quantifiable adjustments in SC activity related to sonar call production, and that adaptive changes in SC sensorimotor processing are preserved across behavioral contexts. We examined pooled SC activity using a dimensionality reduction technique to isolate the largest changes in firing rates across multichannel SC recordings. We then examined the variation in SC activity from the time of echo arrival (sensory input) to call production (motor output). Our data show that increases in call rate are associated with shorter trajectory lengths in neural state space, reflecting reduced variability and increased efficiency in population activity. Strikingly, when bats cluster calls into sonar sound groups (SSGs, which are rapid bursts of calls to increase sensory sampling), SC activity is distinct from times when bats produce isolated calls. Notably, we find that successive SSGs lead to progressively shorter trajectory lengths, suggesting a refinement of sensorimotor processing across successive SSGs. Together, our findings demonstrate that sensorimotor population dynamics in the SC follow common principles across distinct behavioral tasks. These results support a fundamental role for the SC in adaptive sensing and highlight its contribution to flexible sensorimotor tranformations in natural behaviors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evolution of vocal control in echolocating bats

  Biological reviews/Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025-12-26 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Echolocating bats display a large repertoire of behavioural plasticity, with vocal flexibility as a core constituent. The speed and accuracy of vocal adjustments executed by echolocating bats are unparalleled by other mammals, including humans. However, the evolutionary pressures behind the extraordinary vocal flexibility of echolocating bats remains elusive. Here we conducted a synthetic review to evaluate critically the probable drivers for all forms of vocal flexibility in echolocating bats. We show that many forms of bat echolocation flexibility, accounting for approximately 60% of vocal adjustment behaviours, function to mitigate acoustic interference, and thus can be attributed to auditory masking. Importantly, half of these anti-interference strategies are related to reafferent masking that is specific to active-sensing animals. We propose that auditory masking mitigation represents a strong selection pressure for the remarkable repertoire of vocal flexibility in echolocating bats.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spatial priors affect sensory weighting in navigation and landing in Egyptian fruit bats

  Journal of Experimental Biology · 2025-09-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Within the framework of Bayesian navigation models, spatial priors weigh the probability of encountering the locations of obstacles, landmarks and goals. Past work has evaluated the role of spatial priors in human and animal navigation; however, the contribution of moment-to-moment spatial attention in navigation performance in different sensory environments has not been considered. Here, we leveraged the directional aim of the Egyptian fruit bat's sonar clicks to monitor its spatial attention during navigation in light and dark environments. Priors were established by training bats to fly to a perch at a fixed location. Expectations were violated on intermittent trials by displacing the perch 15 or 30 cm. Bat flight/echolocation behavior was quantified with high-speed video and microphone array recordings. In the light, with access to vision and echolocation, bats successfully landed on the perch after it was moved 15 cm but often failed after the perch was displaced 30 cm. In the dark, using echolocation alone, bats often failed to find the perch after it was moved only 15 cm, indicating that spatial priors were weighted more heavily when vision was excluded. When bats failed to land in perch-displaced trials in the light and dark, priors guided them to direct their sonar attention to the region of the room where they expected the perch. Bat navigation failures share characteristics with inattentional blindness in humans, where priors interfere with stimulus processing. Our research demonstrates the effect of priors on spatial attention, which differentially affects sensory weighting in light and dark environments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Spatially clustered neurons in the bat midbrain encode vocalization categories

  Nature Neuroscience · 2025-04-14 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Corrigendum: Doppler shift compensation performance in Hipposideros pratti across experimental paradigms

  Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience · 2025-04-11

  erratumOpen accessSenior author

  Dear Editors,We are writing to require to correct a typed error in a previous published manuscript titled “Doppler shift compensation performance in Hipposideros pratti across experimental paradigms”. In the [Materials and methods], [Doppler shift compensation performance], [Paragraph 2]. This sentence previously stated:“[Fs= Fm+(c-vb)/c]”The corrected sentence should be:“[Fs= Fm*(c-vb)/c]” We checked the original codes used to analyze the data and confirm that the data were processed with the correct equation. Thus, this is simply a typo that does not reflect the actual data processing. We apologize for this error and state that this does not change the scientific conclusions of the article in any way.Best regards,Jinhong Luo, on behalf of all authors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Data for "Sparse-to-dense coding transformation between hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1"

  Open MIND · 2025-12-08

  dataset
  DOI

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

• NCS-FO: Active Listening and Attention in 3D Natural Scenes

  NSF · $1.2M · 2017–2023

• CRCNS: Adaptive perceptual-motor feedback for the analysis of complex scenes

  NSF · $695k · 2014–2016

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)