Scientific Overview
The Bat team studies echolocation-guided navigation and prey capture, exploiting the bat's unique sensory ecology. Bats are among the few mammals that rely on active sensing — emitting ultrasonic pulses and interpreting the returning echoes to build a representation of their environment. This makes bats an ideal model for studying how the brain constructs internal models under partial observability.
The team investigates two broad classes of ecological tasks:
- Navigation: Studying navigate-to-target behaviour in mazes of differing complexity, while manipulating navigability and the availability of rewards. These tasks test how bats plan sequential actions and weigh exploration versus exploitation.
- Prey capture: Examining how bats track and intercept moving targets using echolocation, a naturally ecological task that requires real-time inference of a partially observable world state.
A unique strength of the Bat team is its capacity for outdoor research ("outdoor SCENE"), tracking bats in the wild using on-animal sensors. This enables the study of ecologically valid behaviour at scales and complexities that are difficult to replicate in the laboratory.
Key Questions
- How do bats represent the spatial structure of their environment through echolocation, and how do these representations adapt as maze complexity changes?
- How does the bat brain weigh the benefits of exploration versus exploitation during navigation?
- How do bats infer the trajectory of moving prey from sparse, self-generated sensory evidence?
- How do neural state representations in freely-navigating bats compare between laboratory and naturalistic outdoor environments?
Team Members
Cynthia Moss
Johns Hopkins University
Team Leader
Xaq Pitkow
Carnegie Mellon University
Nachum Ulanovsky
Weizmann Institute of Science
Researchers
12
Davi Drieskens
Postdoc
Johns Hopkins University
Keegan Eveland
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Shifra Ferziger
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Nikita Finger
Postdoc
Johns Hopkins University
Magdiel Jaroszewski
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Rie Kaneko
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Maximilian Kirschhock
Postdoc
Weizmann Institute of Science
Aditya Krishna
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Liora Las
Senior Staff Scientist
Weizmann Institute of Science
Shaked Palgi
PhD Student
Weizmann Institute of Science
Catherine Rasgaitis
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Ben Viner
PhD Student
Johns Hopkins University
Related Publications
The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience: Studying how the brain interacts with the world
Angelaki DE (SCENE principal investigator), Batista A (SCENE principal investigator), Fitzgerald T (SCENE principal investigator), Kominsky JF (SCENE principal investigator), Lengyel M (SCENE principal investigator), Mathis A (SCENE principal investigator), Mathis MW (SCENE principal investigator), Moss CF (SCENE principal investigator), Niell CM (SCENE principal investigator), Noel JP (SCENE principal investigator), Pitkow X (SCENE principal investigator), Rothkopf CA (SCENE principal investigator), Savin C (SCENE principal investigator), Stachenfeld K (SCENE principal investigator), Suthana N (SCENE principal investigator), Tolias A (SCENE principal investigator), Ulanovsky N (SCENE principal investigator), Wolpert DM (SCENE principal investigator), Wong A (SCENE principal investigator), Zimmermann J (SCENE principal investigator)
Neuron, 2026 · DOI · Preprint (PDF)
Natural auditory behaviors invoke cognitive brain networks
Krishna A (SCENE researcher), Capshaw G, Moss CF (SCENE principal investigator)
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 2026 · DOI
Sparse-to-dense coding transformation between hippocampal areas CA3 and CA1
Maimon SR, Eliav T, Aljadeff J, Shalev A, Gronich Y, Finger NM (SCENE researcher), Eveland KE (SCENE researcher), Moss CF (SCENE principal investigator), Las L (SCENE researcher), Ulanovsky N (SCENE principal investigator)
Nature, 2026 · DOI
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