Nikolaas Oosterhof

Nick Oosterfhof is a reserch fellow at CIMeC and at the Dartmouth College, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, NH, USA (supervisors: James V. Haxby, Alfonzo Carramazza).

Main research

My research focuses on the cognitive and neural representation of other people’s and our own actions. Specifically I am interested in how actions are represented in different modalities (e.g. motor, visual, auditory) and how ((dis)similarities of) behavioural and neural representations of actions are mapped onto each other.
In this line of research data is acquired with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) and analyzed using multi-variate pattern analysis.
For exploratory analysis of multi-variate signals in fMRI data I have co-developed the ‘surfing’ matlab toolbox (http://surfing.sourceforge.net). Currently we are porting this toolbox to python for integration with pyMVPA.

Scientific publications

• Oosterhof, N.N., Tipper, S.P., & Downing, P.E. (in press). Viewpoint (in)dependence of action representations: an MVPA study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
• Linden, D.E.J., Oosterhof, N.N., Klein, C, & Dowing, P.E. (2012). Mapping brain activation and information during category-specic visual working memory. Journal of Neurophysiology, 107(2), pp. 628–639.
• Plumpton, C.O, Kuncheva, L.I., Oosterhof, N.N., & Johnson, S.J. (in press). Naive Random Subspace Ensamble with Linear Classiers for Real Time Classication of fMRI data. Pattern Recognition.
• Harsay, H.A., Cohen, M.X., Oosterhof, N.N., Forstmann, B.U., Mars., R.B., & Ridderinkhof, K.R (2011). Func- tional Connectivity of the Striatum links Motivation to Action Control in Humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 31 (29), pp. 10701–10711.
• Todorov, A., Said, C.S., Oosterhof, N.N., & Engell, A.D. (2011). Task-Invariant Brain Responses to the Social Value of Faces. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23, pp. 2766-2781.
• Todorov, A & Oosterhof, N.N.(2011). Modeling Social Perception of Faces. IEEE Social Processing Magazine, 5 (2), pp. 117–122. (Invited)
• Oosterhof, N.N., Wiestler, T., Downing, P.E., & Diedrichsen, J (2011). A Comparison of Volume-based and Surface-based Multi-voxel Pattern Analysis. Neuroimage [special issue on Multivariate Decoding and Brain Reading], 56 (2), pp. 593–600.
• Oosterhof, N.N., Wiggett, A.J., Diedrichsen, J., Tipper, S.P., & Downing P.E (2010). Surface-based Informa- tion Mapping reveals Crossmodal Vision-Action Representations in Human Parietal and Occipitotemporal Cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 104 (2), pp. 107789.
• Engell, A.D, Nummenmaa, L., Oosterhof, N.N., Henson, R., Haxby, J.V., & Calder, A.J. (2010). Differential Activation of Frontoparietal Attention Networks by Social and Symbolic Spatial Cues. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5 (4), pp. 432440.
• Todorov, A., Loehr, V., & Oosterhof, N.N.(2010). The obligatory nature of holistic processing of faces in social judgments. Perception, 39 (4), pp. 514532.
• Oosterhof, N.N., & Todorov, A. (2009). Shared Perceptual Basis of Emotional Expressions and Trustworthiness Impressions from Faces. Emotion.
• Todorov, A., Pakrashi, M., & Oosterhof, N.N.(2009). Evaluating Faces on Trustworthiness After Minimal Time Exposure. Social Cognition, 27, pp. 813833.