
Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development
School of Psychology, Birkbeck College
Mail: Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
Office: Henry Wellcome Building
Email: ori.ossmy@bbk.ac.uk
website: www.oriossmy.com
Research interests
Behavioural problem solving is ubiquitous across every age and culture—how to navigate a cluttered environment, use a tool, and so on. As our bodies, skills, and environments change, new problems emerge and require new means to solve them. With learning and development, children respond more adaptively and efficiently to environmental challenges and opportunities. With injury and aging, responses become less adaptive and efficient. My overarching goal is to understand (and intervene on) the processes that underlie changes in behavioural problem solving.
My research is based on the working assumption that macro behavioral changes occurring over relatively long time periods—changes due to learning, development, injury, and rehabilitation—emerge from micro, real-time experiences. These real-time experiences, in turn, play out in an interactive system of perceptual, neural, cognitive, and motor processes. The efficiency of these processes and their interactions differs widely among individuals.
My work reflects a unique integration of theory and methods drawn from developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and computer science where I use state-of-the-art concepts and technologies to address critical questions about behavioral problem solving. Bridging the theoretical with the technical, I combine interdisciplinary perspectives (development, behavior, neuroscience, motor control, computer science), recording methods (fMRI, EEG, EMG, tACS, ECoG, single-unit recordings, eye tracking, motion tracking, virtual reality, and video), analytic techniques (real-time, machine learning, and robotics), populations (infants to elderly adults and patients), and behavioral tasks (manual and locomotor).
Publications
- Ossmy, O., Kaplan, B., Han, D., Xu, M., Mukamel, R., Adolph, K.E. (in press). Real-time processes in the development of planning. Current Biology [https://psyarxiv.com/3q8p2]
- Shuster, A., Inzelberg, L., Ossmy, O., Izakson, L., Hanein, Y., Levy, D. (in press). Lie to my face: An electromyography approach to deceptive behavior. Brain and Behavior [https://psyarxiv.com/vxgjp/]
- Ossmy, O., Han, D., Kaplan, B., Xu, M., Bianco, C., Mukamel, R., Adolph, K.E. (2021). Children do not distinguish efficient from inefficient actions during observation. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 1-13
- Le, H., Hoch, J., Ossmy, O., Adolph, K., Fern, X., Fern, A. (2021). Modeling infant free play behavior using hidden markov models. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), pp. 1-6
- Hoch, J.*, Ossmy, O.*, Hasan, S., Cole, W., Adolph, K.E. (2021). “Dancing” together: Infant-mother locomotor synchrony. Child Development, 92(4), 1337-1353
- Ossmy, O., Adolph, K.E. (2020). Real-time assembly of coordination patterns in human infants. Current Biology, 30, 1-10
- Lakertz, Y.*, Ossmy, O.*, Friedmann, N., Mukamel, R., Fried, I. (2021). Single-cell activity in human STG during perception of phonemes is organized according to manner of articulation. NeuroImage, 226, 117499.
- Ossmy, O., Mansano, L., Frenkel-Toledo, S., Kagan, E., Koren, S., Gilron, R., Reznik, D., Soroker, N., Mukamel, R. (2020). Motor learning in Hemi-Parkinson using VR-manipulated sensory feedback. Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology, 1-13
- Ossmy, O., Han, D., Cheng, M., Kaplan, B., Adolph, K.E. (2020). Look before you fit: Real-time planning cascade in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 189, 104696
- Ossmy, O., Mansano, L., Frenkel-Toledo, S., Kagan, E., Koren, S., Gilron, R., Reznik, D., Soroker, N., Mukamel, R. (2020). Motor learning by cross education in Hemi-Parkinson’s disease: Case study of the effects of virtual mirrored sensory feedback. 2019 International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation (ICVR), Tel Aviv, Israel, 2019, pp. 1-9
- Ossmy, O., Gilmore, R. O., & Adolph, K. E (2020). AutoViDev: A computer-vision framework to enhance and accelerate research in human development. In K. Arai & S. Kapoor (Eds.), Advances in computer vision: CVC 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 944. Springer.
- Adolph, K. E., Hoch, J. E., & Ossmy, O. (2020). James Gibson’s ecological approach to locomotion and manipulation: Development and changing affordances. In J. Wagman & J. Blau (Eds.). Perception as information detection: Reflections on Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception. New York: Taylor & Francis, pp. 248-266
- Karasik, L., Tamis-LeMonda, C.S., Ossmy, O., Adolph, K.E. (2018). The ties that bind: Cradling in Tajikistan. Plos One 13:e0204428
- Ossmy, O.*, Hoch, J.*, MacAlpine, P., Hasan, S., Stone, P., Adolph, K.E. (2018). Variety wins: Soccer-playing robots and infant walking. Frontiers in Neuro-robotics, 12:19
- Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2018). Perception as a route for transfer of motor knowledge: Perspectives from human neuroscience. Neuroscience, 382:144-153
- Aridan N.*, Ossmy, O.*, Mukamel, R. (2018). EEG mu wave suppression during action observation corresponds with subsequent individual changes in execution. Brain Research, 1691:55-63
- Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2017). Behavioral and neural effects of congruency of visual feedback during short-term motor learning. NeuroImage, 172:864-873
- Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2017). Using virtual reality to transfer motor skill knowledge from one hand to another. Journal of Visualized Experiments: JoVE, (127)
- Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2017). Short term motor-skill acquisition improves with size of self-controlled virtual hands. PloS One, 12(1), e0168520
- Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2016). Neural network underlying intermanual skill transfer in humans. Cell Reports, 17:2891-2900
- Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2016). Activity in superior parietal cortex during training by observation predicts asymmetric learning levels across hands. Scientific Reports, 6:32133
- Ossmy, O., Fried, I., Mukamel, R. (2015). Decoding speech perception from single cell activity in humans. NeuroImage, 117:151-159
- Reznik, D., Ossmy, O., Mukamel, R. (2015). Enhanced auditory evoked activity to self-generated sounds is mediated by primary and supplementary motor cortices. The Journal of Neuroscience, 35:2173-2180
- Ossmy, O., Ben-Shachar, M., Mukamel, R. (2014). Decoding letter position in word reading. Cortex, 59:74-83
- Ossmy, O.*, Moran, R.*, Pfeffer, T., Tsetsos, K., Usher, M., & Donner, T. H. (2013). The timescale of perceptual evidence integration can be adapted to the environment. Current Biology, 23:981-986
- Ossmy, O., Tam, O., Puzis, R., Rokach, L., Inbar, O., & Elovici, Y. (2011). MindDesktop - computer accessibility for severely handicapped. ICEIS:316-320