Robert Oostenveld

Radboud University | RU · Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour

Optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) are wearable MEG sensors that can detect magnetic fields generated by human brain activity. Compared to superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), OPMs' main advantage is that they do not require cryogenic cooling with liquid helium. This allows them to be placed closer to the scalp, picking up larg...

On the centenary of the first human EEG recording, more than 500 experts reflect on the impact that this discovery has had on our understanding of the brain and behaviour. We document their priorities and call for collective action focusing on validity, democratization and responsibility to realize the potential of EEG in science and society over t...

Freezing of gait, characterized by involuntary interruptions of walking, is a debilitating motor symptom of Parkinson's disease that restricts people's autonomy. Previous brain imaging studies investigating the mechanisms underlying freezing were restricted to scan people in supine positions and yielded conflicting theories regarding the role of th...

We present an extension to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) for motion data. Motiondata is frequently recorded alongside human brain imaging and electrophysiological data.The goal of Motion-BIDS is to make motion data interoperable across different laboratoriesand with other data modalities in human brain and behavioral research. To this end...

Previous studies have found electroencephalogram (EEG) amplitude and scalp topography differences between neurotypical and neurological/neurosurgical groups, being interpreted at the cognitive level. However, these comparisons are invariably accompanied by anatomical changes. Critical to EEG are the so‐called volume currents, which are affected by...

Adequate control over evolutionary engrained bodily stress reactions is essential to avoid23 disproportionate responses during highly arousing situations in police. This regulation can be trained24 via heart rate variability (HRV)-biofeedback, a widely used intervention aiming to improve stress25 regulation, but typically conducted under passive, l...

The extension to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) for motion data (Motion-BIDS) aims to standardize the organization of motion data for reproducible research in human brain and behavioral studies. Motion data is frequently recorded alongside brain imaging and electrophysiological data, and Motion-BIDS provides a common format and metadata st...

Surface facial electromyography (EMG) is commonly used to detect emotions from subtle facial expressions. Although there are established procedures for collecting EMG data and some aspects of their processing, there is little agreement among researchers about the optimal way to process the EMG signal, so that the study-unrelated variability (noise)...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven standard for the organization of data and metadata from a growing range of neuroscience modalities. This paper is meant as a history of how the standard has developed and grown over time. We outline the principles behind the project, the mechanisms by which it has been extended, and some...

Introduction Volume conduction models of the human head are used in various neuroscience fields, such as for source reconstruction in EEG and MEG, and for modeling the effects of brain stimulation. Numerous studies have quantified the accuracy and sensitivity of volume conduction models by analyzing the effects of the geometrical and electrical fea...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterised by a loss of dopamine and dopaminergic cells. The consequences hereof are widespread network disturbances in brain function. It is an ongoing topic of investigation how the disease-related changes in brain function manifest in PD relate to clinical symptoms. We present The Swedish National Facility for Magn...

Speaking requires the temporally coordinated planning of core linguistic information, from conceptual meaning to articulation. Recent neurophysiological results suggested that these operations involve a cascade of neural events with subsequent onset times, whilst competing evidence suggests early parallel neural activation. To test these hypotheses...

Previous studies have found EEG amplitude and scalp topography differences between neurotypical and neurological/neurosurgical groups, being interpreted at the cognitive level. However, these comparisons are invariably accompanied by anatomical changes. Critical to EEG are the so-called volume currents, which are affected by the spatial distributio...

We present an extension to the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) for motion data. Motion data is frequently recorded alongside human brain imaging and electrophysiological data. The goal of Motion-BIDS is to make motion data interoperable across different laboratories and with other data modalities in human brain and behavioral research. To this...

BACKGROUND: Freezing of gait, characterized by involuntary interruptions of walking, is a debilitating motor symptom of Parkinson’s disease that restricts people’s autonomy. Previous brain imaging studies investigating the mechanisms underlying freezing were restricted to scan people in supine positions and yielded conflicting theories regarding th...

Preparing intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) datasets for analysis presents a unique set of methodological challenges that are absent in non-invasive investigative techniques. Because iEEG is primarily used in epilepsy patients with varying brain pathologies, the main challenges pertain to variability in electrode coverage and therefore the...

Surface facial electromyography (EMG) is a promising approach to detect emotions from subtle facial expressions. However, there is little agreement among researchers about the optimal way to process the EMG signal, so that the study-unrelated variability (noise) is removed, and the emotion-related variability is best detected. The aim of the curren...

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an increasingly popular neuroimaging technique that measures cortical hemodynamic activity in a non-invasive and portable fashion. Although the fNIRS community has been successful in disseminating several open-source processing tools and a standard file format (SNIRF), the development of reproducible...

Background: functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an increasingly popular tool to study cortical activity during movement and gait that requires further validation. This study aimed to assess (1) whether fNIRS can detect the difficult-to-measure leg area of the primary motor cortex (M1) and distinguish it from the hand area; and (2) whet...

Given that the choices made during recording, preprocessing and analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) data can affect study outcomes, it is critical that they are transparently reported to allow for reproducibility and replicability. Yet, systematic reviews of reporting practices in the field have shown that journal articles do not meet this g...

Objectives The understanding of the cortical effects of spinal cord stimulation (SCS) remains limited. Multiple studies have investigated the effects of SCS in resting-state electroencephalography. However, owing to the large variation in reported outcomes, we aimed to describe the differential cortical responses between two types of SCS and betwee...

Significance: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a popular neuroimaging technique with proliferating hardware platforms, analysis approaches, and software tools. There has not been a standardized file format for storing fNIRS data, which has hindered the sharing of data as well as the adoption and development of software tools. Aim:...

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Background: functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an increasingly popular tool to study cortical activity during movement and gait. However, this comes with a number of challenges, like the correction for movement-induced systemic changes (i.e., changes in blood pressure, heart rate, breathing). We investigated gait-related tasks in a co...

Since the second-half of the twentieth century, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including both electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), has provided an intimate view into the human brain. At the interface between fundamental research and the clinic, iEEG provides both high temporal resolution and high spatia...

Language production involves a complex set of computations, from conceptualisation to articulation, which are thought to engage cascading neural events in the language network. However, recent neuromagnetic evidence suggests simultaneous meaning-to-speech mapping in picture naming tasks, as indexed by early parallel activation of fronto-temporal re...

Source reconstruction of magnetoencephalography (MEG) has been used to assess brain reorganization after brain damage, such as stroke. Lesions result in parts of the brain having an electrical conductivity that differs from the normal values. The effect this has on the forward solutions (i.e., the propagation of electric currents and magnetic field...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a specification for organizing, sharing, and archiving neuroimaging data and metadata in a reusable way. First developed for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets, the community-led specification evolved rapidly to include other modalities such as magnetoencephalography, positron emission tomography, a...

Preparing intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) datasets for analysis presents a unique set of methodological challenges that are absent in non-invasive investigative techniques. Because iEEG is primarily used in epilepsy patients with varying brain pathologies, the main challenges pertain to variability in electrode coverage and therefore the...

The increasing requirements for adoption of FAIR data management and sharing original research data from neuroimaging studies can be at odds with protecting the anonymity of the research participants due to the person-identifiable anatomical features in the data. We propose a solution to this dilemma for anatomical MRIs used in MEG source analysis....

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standard for organizing and describing neuroimaging datasets, serving not only to facilitate the process of data sharing and aggregation, but also to simplify the application and development of new methods and software for working with neuroimaging data. Here, we present an extension of BIDS to include p...

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delive...

An individual’s blood pressure (BP) reactivity to stress is linked to increased risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. However, inter- and intra-individual BP variability makes understanding the coupling between stress, BP reactivity, and long-term outcomes challenging. Previous microneurographic studies of sympathetic signaling to muscle...

Decreases in oscillatory alpha- and beta- band power have been consistently found in spoken- word production. These have been linked to both motor prepa-ration and conceptual- lexical retrieval processes. However, the observed power decreases have a broad frequency range that spans two “classic” (sensorimotor) bands: alpha and beta. It remains uncl...

Analyses of brain function and anatomy using shared neuroimaging data is an important development, and have acquired the potential to be scaled up with the specification of a new Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) standard. To date, a variety of software tools help researchers in converting their source data to BIDS but often require programming s...

For a number of years, facial features removal techniques such as ‘defacing’, ‘skull stripping’ and ‘face masking/blurring’, were considered adequate privacy preserving tools to openly share brain images. Scientifically, these measures were already a compromise between data protection requirements and research impact of such data. Now, recent advan...

Beamforming is a popular method for functional source reconstruction using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data. Beamformers, which were first proposed for MEG more than two decades ago, have since been applied in hundreds of studies, demonstrating that they are a versatile and robust tool for neuroscience. However, ce...

The increasing requirements for adoption of FAIR data management and sharing original research data from neuroimaging studies can be at odds with protecting the anonymity of the research participants due to the person-identifiable anatomical features in the data. We propose a solution to this dilemma for anatomical MRIs used in MEG source analysis....

It is widely recognized that police performance may be hindered by psychophysiological state changes during acute stress. To address the need for awareness and control of these physiological changes, police academies in many countries have implemented Heart-Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training. Despite these trainings now being widely delive...

Developmental research using electroencephalography (EEG) offers valuable insights in brain processes early in life, but at the same time, applying this sensitive technique to young children who are often non-compliant and have short attention spans comes with practical limitations. It is thus of particular importance to optimally use the limited r...

For a number of years, facial features removal techniques such as 'defacing', 'skull stripping' and 'face masking/ blurring', were considered adequate privacy preserving tools to openly share brain images. Scientifically, these measures were already a compromise between data protection requirements and research impact of such data. Now, recent adva...

The Human Connectome Project (HCP) was launched in 2010 as an ambitious effort to accelerate advances in human neuroimaging, particularly for measures of brain connectivity; apply these advances to study a large number of healthy young adults; and freely share the data and tools with the scientific community. NIH awarded grants to two consortia; th...

As the global health crisis unfolded, many academic conferences moved online in 2020. This move has been hailed as a positive step towards inclusivity in its attenuation of economic, physical, and legal barriers and effectively enabled many individuals from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented to join and participate. A number of st...

Oxytocin influences how communicators adjust their utterances based on their knowledge about a recipient, a process known as recipient design. This communicative phenomenon necessitates cognitive exploration, namely, it requires communicator to integrate their original expectation and new evidence about the recipient gathered during live communicat...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standard for organizing and describing neuroimaging datasets. It serves not only to facilitate the process of data sharing and aggregation, but also to simplify the application and development of new methods and software for working with neuroimaging data. Here, we present an extension of BIDS to include...

Introduction: Objective disease markers are a key for diagnosis and personalized interventions. In chronic pain, such markers are still not available, and therapy relies on individual patients' reports. However, several pain studies have reported group-based differences in functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, and magnetoe...

Brainhack is an innovative meeting format that promotes scientific collaboration and education in an open, inclusive environment. This NeuroView describes the myriad benefits for participants and the research community and how Brainhacks complement conventional formats to augment scientific progress.

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardized analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...

The move from in-person to online scientific conferences due to the global health crisis has been hailed as a positive step towards inclusivity in its attenuation of economic, physical and legal barriers. Yet pre-existing and new challenges to truly inclusive conference experiences remain unaddressed. While acknowledging the benefits of an online s...

As part of the Dutch national science program “Professional Games for Professional Skills” we developed a stress-exposure biofeedback training in virtual reality (VR) for the Dutch police. We aim to reduce the acute negative impact of stress on performance, as well as long-term consequences for mental health by facilitating physiological stress reg...

Brainhack is an innovative meeting format that promotes scientific collaboration and education in an open and inclusive environment. Departing from the formats of typical scientific workshops, these events are based on grassroots projects and training, and foster open and reproducible scientific practices. We describe here the multifaceted, lasting...

The analysis of EEG and MEG data typically requires a lengthy and complicated sequence of analysis steps, often requiring large amounts of computations, which are ideally represented in analysis scripts. These scripts are often written by researchers without formal training in computer science, resulting in the quality and readability of these anal...

Having the means to share research data openly is essential to modern science. For human research, a key aspect in this endeavor is obtaining consent from participants, not just to take part in a study, which is a basic ethical principle, but also to share their data with the scientific community. To ensure that the participants' privacy is respect...

Significance Coordinated activity of sensory and motor cortices is essential for adjusting movements based on sensory feedback. Sensory and motor cortices communicate directly as well as via the thalamus and also receive indirect input from the cerebellum. We show here that cerebellar activity can affect the amplitude and coherence of fast sensorim...

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardised analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...

Learning to associate written letters with speech sounds is crucial for the initial phase of acquiring reading skills. However, little is known about the cortical reorganization for supporting letter-speech sound learning, particularly the brain dynamics during the learning of grapheme-phoneme associations. In the present study, we trained 30 Finni...

Parkinson’s disease is characterized by a gradual loss of dopaminergic neurons, which is associated with altered neuronal activity in the beta-band (13-30 Hz). Assessing beta-band activity typically involves transforming the time-series to get the power of the signal in the frequency-domain. Such transformation assumes that the time-series can be r...

Beamformers are applied for estimating spatiotemporal characteristics of neuronal sources underlying measured MEG/EEG signals. Several MEG analysis toolboxes include an implementation of a linearly constrained minimum-variance (LCMV) beamformer. However, differences in implementations and in their results complicate the selection and application of...

Learning to associate written letters with speech sounds is crucial for the initial phase of acquiring reading skills. However, little is known about the cortical reorganization for supporting letter-speech sound learning, particularly the brain dynamics during the learning of grapheme-phoneme associations. In the present study, we trained 30 Finni...

Source modelling in magnetoencephalography (MEG) requires precise co-regis-tration of the sensor array and the anatomical structure of the measured individual's head. In conventional MEG, the positions and orientations of the sensors relative to each other are fixed and known beforehand, requiring only localization of the head relative to the senso...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) project is a rapidly evolving effort in the human brain imaging research community to create standards allowing researchers to readily organize and share study data within and between laboratories. Here we present an extension to BIDS for electroencephalography (EEG) data, EEG-BIDS, along with tools and refer...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven specification for organizing neuroscience data and metadata with the aim to make datasets more transparent, reusable, and reproducible. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the living human brai...

Beamformers are applied for estimating spatiotemporal characteristics of neuronal sources underlying measured MEG/EEG signals. Several MEG analysis toolboxes include an implementation of a linearly constrained minimum-variance (LCMV) beamformer. However, differences in implementations and in their results complicate the selection and application of...

Parkinson’s disease is characterized by a gradual loss of dopaminergic neurons, which are associated with altered neuronal activity in the beta band (13-30 Hz). Assessing beta band activity typically involves transforming the time-series to get the power of the signal in the frequency-domain. Such transformation assumes that the time-series can be...