About

Dora Angelaki is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her research interests include circuitry and models of navigation and multi-sensory integration, focusing on understanding how sensory information is processed and integrated to support navigation and spatial orientation. She is involved in advancing knowledge in these areas through her academic and research activities.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Pathology
• Cognitive psychology
• Communication
• Medicine
• Statistics
• Computer vision
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Temporal Structure of Reward Availability and Sensory Uncertainty Modulate Allocation Dynamics in Naturalistic Foraging

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2026-04-17

  articleOpen access

  Adaptive foraging requires animals to combine uncertain sensory cues with predictions about when rewards are likely to occur. While theoretical models describe how animals should allocate their effort under variable-interval reward schedules, it remains unclear how the timing or rewards and the reliability of sensory cues affects behavior. We developed a continuous foraging task in which freely moving macaque monkeys navigated among three reward patches. Rewards became available at unpredictable times, with their availability signaled by a visual cue of varying reliability. We also varied the schedule of reward availability: in some conditions, rewards were equally likely to become available at any moment (exponentially distributed intervals), while in others the interval distribution was more concentrated around a particular mean (gamma-distributed intervals) which increased the cost of premature responses. Under exponential schedules, monkeys eventually allocated their time at different patches according to reward schedules, and cue reliability had only modest effects. Under gamma-distributed intervals, monkeys more quickly learned to differentiate between patches. Their choices were more strongly dependent on predicted reward timing, particularly when sensory cues were highly reliable. These results show that both the timing of rewards and reliability of sensory cues shape how animals allocate their time and effort in continuous naturalistic foraging tasks.

  PublisherDOI

• Belief embodiment through eye movements facilitates memory-guided navigation

  Nature Communications · 2025-11-24 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The brain evolved to navigate a dynamic and uncertain world, but the mechanisms underlying ethologically-relevant behavioral strategies remain unclear. In the real-world, such strategies are shaped both by task demands and by the cognitive resources available to the animal. We hypothesized that eye movements constitute a vital cognitive resource to support neural computations for memory-guided navigation. We tested this using a naturalistic task in which humans use a joystick to steer and catch flashing targets in a virtual environment lacking explicit position cues. While navigating to the goal, participants physically track the latent target position with their gaze even in the absence of optic flow, demonstrating that these task-relevant eye movements reflect an embodiment of the subjects’ dynamic internal beliefs about the goal location. We developed a neural network model with tuned recurrent connectivity between oculomotor and evidence-integrating frontoparietal circuits to account for this behavioral strategy. We show that this model better explained neural data from male monkeys’ posterior parietal cortex compared to models optimized solely for task performance and unconstrained by such an oculomotor-based strategy. These results highlight the importance of eye movements in working memory computations and establish a functional significance of oculomotor signals for evidence-integration and navigation computations via embodied cognition. Neural basis of belief embodiment is not fully understood. Here authors show that eye movements embody internal beliefs about goal location during navigation, even without visual cues. This cognitive strategy facilitates memory-guided navigation, a finding confirmed by a neural network model that accurately reflects behavioral and monkey neural data.

  PublisherDOI

• A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour

  Nature · 2025-09-03 · 61 citations

  articleOpen access

  . It is difficult to meet this challenge if different laboratories apply different analyses to different recordings in different regions during different behaviours. Here we report a comprehensive set of recordings from 621,733 neurons recorded with 699 Neuropixels probes across 139 mice in 12 laboratories. The data were obtained from mice performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor and cognitive components. The probes covered 279 brain areas in the left forebrain and midbrain and the right hindbrain and cerebellum. We provide an initial appraisal of this brain-wide map and assess how neural activity encodes key task variables. Representations of visual stimuli transiently appeared in classical visual areas after stimulus onset and then spread to ramp-like activity in a collection of midbrain and hindbrain regions that also encoded choices. Neural responses correlated with impending motor action almost everywhere in the brain. Responses to reward delivery and consumption were also widespread. This publicly available dataset represents a resource for understanding how computations distributed across and within brain areas drive behaviour.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism

  Nature Neuroscience · 2025-06-03 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex drives strategic aborting by optimizing long-run policy extraction

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2024-11-28

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Real world choices often involve balancing decisions that are optimized for the short-vs. long-term. Here, we reason that apparently sub-optimal single trial decisions in macaques may in fact reflect long-term, strategic planning. We demonstrate that macaques freely navigating in VR for sequentially presented targets will strategically abort offers, forgoing more immediate rewards on individual trials to maximize session-long returns. This behavior is highly specific to the individual, demonstrating that macaques reason about their own long-run performance. Reinforcement-learning (RL) models suggest this behavior is algorithmically supported by modular actor-critic networks with a policy module not only optimizing long-term value functions, but also informed of specific state-action values allowing for rapid policy optimization. The behavior of artificial networks suggests that changes in policy for a matched offer ought to be evident as soon as offers are made, even if the aborting behavior occurs much later. We confirm this prediction by demonstrating that single units and population dynamics in macaque dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), but not parietal area 7a or dorsomedial superior temporal area (MSTd), reflect the upcoming reward-maximizing aborting behavior upon offer presentation. These results cast dlPFC as a specialized policy module, and stand in contrast to recent work demonstrating the distributed and recurrent nature of belief-networks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Inductive biases of neural network modularity in spatial navigation

  Science Advances · 2024-07-19 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The brain may have evolved a modular architecture for daily tasks, with circuits featuring functionally specialized modules that match the task structure. We hypothesize that this architecture enables better learning and generalization than architectures with less specialized modules. To test this, we trained reinforcement learning agents with various neural architectures on a naturalistic navigation task. We found that the modular agent, with an architecture that segregates computations of state representation, value, and action into specialized modules, achieved better learning and generalization. Its learned state representation combines prediction and observation, weighted by their relative uncertainty, akin to recursive Bayesian estimation. This agent's behavior also resembles macaques' behavior more closely. Our results shed light on the possible rationale for the brain's modularity and suggest that artificial systems can use this insight from neuroscience to improve learning and generalization in natural tasks.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A common computational and neural anomaly across mouse models of autism

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2024-05-08 · 4 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Computational psychiatry has suggested that humans within the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) inflexibly update their expectations (i.e., Bayesian priors). Here, we leveraged high-yield rodent psychophysics (n = 75 mice), extensive behavioral modeling (including principled and heuristics), and (near) brain-wide single cell extracellular recordings (over 53k units in 150 brain areas) to ask (1) whether mice with different genetic perturbations associated with ASD show this same computational anomaly, and if so, (2) what neurophysiological features are shared across genotypes in subserving this deficit. We demonstrate that mice harboring mutations in Fmr1 , Cntnap2 , and Shank3B show a blunted update of priors during decision-making. Neurally, the differentiating factor between animals flexibly and inflexibly updating their priors was a shift in the weighting of prior encoding from sensory to frontal cortices. Further, in mouse models of ASD frontal areas showed a preponderance of units coding for deviations from the animals’ long-run prior, and sensory responses did not differentiate between expected and unexpected observations. These findings demonstrate that distinct genetic instantiations of ASD may yield common neurophysiological and behavioral phenotypes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lightning Pose: improved animal pose estimation via semi-supervised learning, Bayesian ensembling and cloud-native open-source tools

  Nature Methods · 2024-06-25 · 57 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Context-invariant beliefs are supported by dynamic reconfiguration of single unit functional connectivity in prefrontal cortex of male macaques

  Nature Communications · 2024-07-09 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Natural behaviors occur in closed action-perception loops and are supported by dynamic and flexible beliefs abstracted away from our immediate sensory milieu. How this real-world flexibility is instantiated in neural circuits remains unknown. Here, we have male macaques navigate in a virtual environment by primarily leveraging sensory (optic flow) signals, or by more heavily relying on acquired internal models. We record single-unit spiking activity simultaneously from the dorsomedial superior temporal area (MSTd), parietal area 7a, and the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Results show that while animals were able to maintain adaptive task-relevant beliefs regardless of sensory context, the fine-grain statistical dependencies between neurons, particularly in 7a and dlPFC, dynamically remapped with the changing computational demands. In dlPFC, but not 7a, destroying these statistical dependencies abolished the area's ability for cross-context decoding. Lastly, correlational analyses suggested that the more unit-to-unit couplings remapped in dlPFC, and the less they did so in MSTd, the less were population codes and behavior impacted by the loss of sensory evidence. We conclude that dynamic functional connectivity between neurons in prefrontal cortex maintain a stable population code and context-invariant beliefs during naturalistic behavior.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Causal inference during closed-loop navigation: parsing of self- and object-motion

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2023-08-07 · 20 citations

  articleOpen access

  A key computation in building adaptive internal models of the external world is to ascribe sensory signals to their likely cause(s), a process of causal inference (CI). CI is well studied within the framework of two-alternative forced-choice tasks, but less well understood within the cadre of naturalistic action-perception loops. Here, we examine the process of disambiguating retinal motion caused by self- and/or object-motion during closed-loop navigation. First, we derive a normative account specifying how observers ought to intercept hidden and moving targets given their belief about (i) whether retinal motion was caused by the target moving, and (ii) if so, with what velocity. Next, in line with the modelling results, we show that humans report targets as stationary and steer towards their initial rather than final position more often when they are themselves moving, suggesting a putative misattribution of object-motion to the self. Further, we predict that observers should misattribute retinal motion more often: (i) during passive rather than active self-motion (given the lack of an efference copy informing self-motion estimates in the former), and (ii) when targets are presented eccentrically rather than centrally (given that lateral self-motion flow vectors are larger at eccentric locations during forward self-motion). Results support both of these predictions. Lastly, analysis of eye movements show that, while initial saccades toward targets were largely accurate regardless of the self-motion condition, subsequent gaze pursuit was modulated by target velocity during object-only motion, but not during concurrent object- and self-motion. These results demonstrate CI within action-perception loops, and suggest a protracted temporal unfolding of the computations characterizing CI. This article is part of the theme issue 'Decision and control processes in multisensory perception'.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01EY019087

  NIH · $1.9M · 2014

• NIH Grant R01EY017866

  NIH · $3.4M · 2016

• Inertial and multisensory influences on entorhinal grid cells

  NIH · $436k · 2016–2019

• NIH Grant F32DC000092

  NIH · $31k

• NIH Grant R29EY010851

  NIH · $440k · 1999

Frequent coauthors

• Gregory C. DeAngelis

  University of Rochester

  131 shared

• J. David Dickman

  Baylor College of Medicine

  65 shared

• Xaq Pitkow

  Carnegie Mellon University

  57 shared

• Kaushik J. Lakshminarasimhan

  Columbia University

  48 shared

• Jean Laurens

  École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

  47 shared

• Dianne M. Broussard

  35 shared

• Kathleen E. Cullen

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  35 shared

• Lloyd B. Minor

  35 shared

Education

• Postdoctorate, Oculomotor system

  University of Zurich

  1993

• Postdoctorate, Vestibular physiology

  University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

  1992

• Ph.D., Biomedical Engineering

  University of Minnesota System

  1991

• M.S., Biomedical Engineering

  University of Minnesota System

  1989