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Rob Chavez

@robchavez.bsky.social
2.5K followers 1.1K following 670 posts

Associate professor and neurobumpkin at University of Oregon. Attempting to study social cognitive neurons and oligodendrocytes with human neuroimaging. New Mexican expat, but I have friends everywhere. csnl.uoregon.edu

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Our latest paper led by Taylor Guthrie with former undergrad RA Aussie Frost. We show that multivariate fMRI signals can decode the identity of specific individuals within the DMN and in the absence of visual features or other lower-level sensory information. link.springer.com/article/10.3...
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LT @lindseytepfer.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
We don’t just lock on to our first impression of someone and call it a day. Instead, we regularly revise our appraisals as we learn more about them. But *how* do our brains make this process possible? Check out this fresh pre-print to see how we went about answering this question!
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Yep..
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
🎵 My tongue's the only muscle on my body that works harder than my heart.. 🎵 amyleesterling.github.io/human-brain/...
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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 27/08/2026
Psychological Science special issue call 📣 Ever had your research denigrated bc it's "only descriptive", "what's the mechanism though?" and "but what are the theoretical implications?" Now has come your time to shine. Send your best descriptive work! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...
Psychological Science invites submissions that advance psychological science through careful description of psychological phenomena. Psychological research often focuses on explaining and predicting phenomena before we have a sufficiently detailed understanding of them. It can be difficult to build strong theories on incomplete empirical foundations of the phenomena themselves. Careful descriptive research helps establish shared empirical reference points developed around well-characterized phenomena. As such, descriptive research contributes to psychological science both by improving our understanding of the phenomena themselves and by providing a stronger foundation for future theory-building, explanation, and prediction.

We are interested in manuscripts that:

Deepen our understanding of psychological phenomena, including what they look like, how they vary, and how they unfold;
Draw on a variety of sources of evidence and methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches; research conducted in naturalistic settings; intensive, longitudinal, or small-sample designs; and open or large-scale datasets; 
Provide necessary context for interpreting what is being described, including who is represented in the data, the settings and circumstances in which phenomena occur, and the broader social contexts in which they are situated; and/or
Make a substantive contribution to psychological science through the quality, depth, or significance of the description provided.
The deadline for submitting regular manuscripts is April 15, 2027. Registered Reports will also be considered. The deadline for submitting Stage 1 Registered Reports is November 15, 2026. Authors should indicate in the “Comments to Editor” box during submission that the manuscript is intended for the “Descriptive Research in Psychological Science” special issue.
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Victoria Guazzelli Williamson @vgwpsych.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Excited to share a recent review with @prof-nick-allen.bsky.social and @jenndsn.bsky.social: Multidimensional social cognitive profiles: Implications for adolescent internalizing psychopathology out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! Free access until Aug 28: authors.elsevier.com/a/…
authors.elsevier.com
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Tim Verstynen @tdverstynen.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
My friend is a co-lead on this project (my wife is a collaborator). Let me tell you what it was about and why Battacharya’s decision simply amplifies the consequences of structural racism that the project was attempting to understand. A 🧵 1/12
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
A refreshingly sober view on important issues in mental health science that I think about a lot... I'm not as pessimistic/nihilistic as I come across sometimes, but I do worry deeply that we are often not meeting the challenges where they are.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Ed Yong used to do amazing science journalism at The Atlantic... Now we get this: www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
theatlantic.com
What if Freud Was Right?
A neuroscientist dares to argue that old-fashioned psychoanalysis holds the key to curing mental illness.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
"Dopamine, bruh..."
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
Three psychologists use QRPs on dubious projects, grossly underpay participants, make coercive and sexist remarks, have their grants revoked, lose their lab space, and wrestle with the possibility of having to work in the private sector... And that's all in just the first 15 minutes of Ghostbusters.
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Mark Thornton @markthornton.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Now in press at Cortex! "False discovery rate correction promotes confounded neuroimaging designs" Paper 🔓: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Effect of confound mass on true positive rates under test-wise FDR correction in completely arbitrary data. Confound mass represents how large a confound is in terms of the product of the number of tests it is present in, and its mean effect size across these tests. Results are shown at differing combinations of true effect size, number of tests with true (i.e., non-confound) effects, and sample size. Inflated surface maps of meta-analytic z-statistics from Neurosynth for low-level confounds (top) and high-level cognitive tasks (bottom). Red reflects positive activations, blue reflects negative (de)activations, and darker colors indicate larger z-statistics. Maps are thresholded at |z| = 1 for visualization purposes.The difference in integrated true positive rate between parcel-wise FDR and parcel-wise FWER (y-axis) is plotted as a function of confound effect size. Each point represents 1 out of 5000 studies simulated for each combination of task and confound. Smoothed loess lines are used to better show the overall trends.Effect of FDR-based publication bias on observed confound effects sizes. Simulated meta-analytic confound effect sizes are visualized through violin plots for each combination of task effect and confound effect examined in the neural data simulations. Meta-analyses featuring publication bias (orange) substantially inflate these effect size estimates in all cases, relative to meta-analyses featuring no publication bias (blue). Moreover, this bias was present – and in most cases larger – in the subset of studies that were included in the meta-analysis specifically when the publication bias was based on FDR instead of FWER integrated true positive rates (green).
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Matt Smear @mattsmear.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
I am a neurodivergent neuroscientist. My bipolar brain brings struggle but it also helps me think off-the-map ideas. To help others who are similarly different, I co-founded the Neurodiversity Innovation Center for Excellence in Neuroscience (niceinneuro.org) with Leah Blankenship and Lila Kaye.
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Eric Hehman @erichehman.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Jon haidt, steven pinker, and cialdini are three psych folks who appear to be attending peter thiels secret meeting
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bioRxiv Neuroscience @biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Person identity drives neural similarity more than action and valence during dynamic emotion perception www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/20…
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Big congratulations to undergrad RA superstar Debbie Okeke for successfully defending her honors thesis "Investigating Neural Patterns In Dynamic Facial Processing Using Representational Similarity Analysis." Debbie started as a freshman in my lab and we are so proud of all that she has accomplished
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
I agree, but It's sad to me that people think we we do is "looking for __ in the brain." And the problem goes both ways. If you are interested in understanding brain, basing it on conceptually vague, poorly measured, or otherwise flawed ideas from psychology isn't helping make progress either.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Popularity of brain regions and networks in every available SANS (@sansmeeting.bsky.social ) program over the years. Now, animated! Looking forward to seeing everyone next week in La Jolla for #SANS2026.
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Erica Busch @elbusch.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
New Perspective out in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! We consider why neuroimaging analyses struggles to predict adolescent mental health, discuss approaches for improving prediction, and provide open-source implementations and tutorials: www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
Revamping neuroimaging analysis to reveal biomarkers of adolescent mental health - Nature Mental Health
Neuroscience research struggles to link neurobiological phenotypes with real-world mental health experiences, especially in youth. Here the authors challenge assumptions in functional neuroimaging stu...
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
Popularity of brain regions and networks in every available SANS (@sansmeeting.bsky.social ) program over the years. Now, animated! Looking forward to seeing everyone next week in La Jolla for #SANS2026.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
My new obsession is ggsegSchaefer for plotting stat maps of our preferred brain parcellation atlas. So easy to customize, manipulate, and make pretty (...even if my general aesthetic tastes remain questionable).
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John Clithero @johnclithero.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Fortunate to be a part of this! Moriah had an incredible dissertation and I was lucky to be on her dissertation committee.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Also, after 19 years into my career, this is my very first empirical publication that is purely behavioral and has zero neuroscience... I'm officially a real psychologist!
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Excited to share our latest paper on computational mechanisms of self-enhancement with links to mental health. We used hierarchical Bayesian drift diffusion modeling to decompose choices on a social comparison task and relate them internalizing symptoms. journals.sagepub.com/eprint/GPFSV...
journals.sagepub.com
Computational Mechanisms of Self-Enhancement During Social Comparison and Their Relationship to Internalizing Symptoms - Moriah S. Stendel, John A. Clithero, Robert S. Chavez, 2026
Internalizing disorders, such as anxiety and depression, commonly feature cognitive biases in self-evaluation, particularly in the context of social comparison....
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Yup..
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 18/03/2026
At a different point in my life, this would have been shocking and disappointing. The only shocking part now is how numb I feel to this kind of news, and the disappointment is with myself for feeling that way. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/u...
nytimes.com
Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years
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Deepu Murty @vpmurty.bsky.social · 03/03/2026
I’m excited to announce a special issue I am guest editing at SCAN with Johanna Jarcho and @maureenritchey.bsky.social on the intersection of memory and social cognition. Find more info here: academic.oup.com/scan/pages/c...
academic.oup.com
The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience invites submissions to a collection on “The Contribution of Episodic Memory to Social Cognition”. Making decisions i
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Victoria Guazzelli Williamson @vgwpsych.bsky.social · 27/02/2026
SPSP is crazy. So many presentations on climate change and environment, yet folks aren’t allowed to take the leftover lunches without tickets because all leftover lunches “must” be thrown away 🤔 Anyways is you see me, say hi! #SPSP2026
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
A nice, level-headed post about the motivations and outcomes of using technology (including LLMs) in research that you care about.
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moin syed @syeducation.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
New post! "Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research," in which I try to describe some of the tensions around using GenAI/LLMs in scientific research, and why it can be so difficult to have productive conversations on the topic. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/valuing-th...
getsyeducated.substack.com
Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research
On reasonable resistance to using GenAI in research
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Interaction effects have all kinds of problems that people have been overlooking for years. Maybe we should finally try to publish this damn preprint: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
biorxiv.org
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
Today, the RAs in my lab told me I have "girl dad energy." I've got some practice...
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João Guassi Moreira @jfguassimoreira.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
My lab at UW Madison is hiring a new lab manager! I’m looking for a motivated and detail-oriented person to help run the lab’s day-to-day, including our ongoing neuroimaging and behavioral studies. This is especially well suited for graduating undergrads thinking about grad school. Link below
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PsychoPy @psychopy.org · 09/02/2026
We're getting excited... just putting the finishing touches to **PsychoPy Studio** This is a complete rewrite of the PsychoPy Builder/Coder app, now packaged in Electron. Faster load, modernised UI, web-ready, independent of the Python interpreter 🎉 🚀 blog.psychopy.org/general%20bl...
blog.psychopy.org
PsychoPy Studio: the app we love, reimagined
It’s now over 20 years since PsychoPy’s humble beginnings as an open-source Python library to help users present high-precision stimuli and collect responses from participants. Since 2009 PsychoPy…
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Nathaniel Haines @natehaines.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme... haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 31/01/2026
Five classes I took in college: - Styles of Scientific Argument - Analysis of Variance - Probability & Statistics for Engineers - Intelligence & Creativity - Advanced Data Analysis II That statistics minor is really pulling its weight... but man, most of my classes sounded so generic.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
Updating my CV now and realizing that in my 19 years in science, I have only ever given one conference symposium talk in my entire career (not counting a grad student blitz and a preconference). ..... and ,of all places, it was at SESP 🤨 🤷
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Oliver Sacks has always been one of my favorite writers, & I've tried to emulate him for a long time. However, anyone who has spent any real effort trying to translate their real-world experience into a compelling narrative knows how unstructured, anticlimactic, and uninteresting reality really is.
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jonny (leachate composite form) @jo.nny.rip · 10/12/2025
"ai is inevitable" is a high accuracy indicator of "I am a sucker"
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 10/12/2025
Code red.... Does anyone know a not-by-hand hack to grade 493 scantrons without a scantron machine? ⚰️
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
But for real, I think my wife has legit won this game... ⚰️
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Jin X. Goh | 吴晋勋 @jinxungoh.bsky.social · 03/12/2025
ManuscriptCentral Wrapped! In 2025, you submitted 5 papers AND all got rejected 🎉 You spent 💯 minutes in total trying to submit your papers! You reviewed for 10 journals that would never publish your papers ❤️
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Andrew D Thaler @drandrewthaler.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
I think I now have a much better understanding of why these dorks are so impressed by ChatGPT.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
My former honors student RA (who co-authored a paper with us as an undergrad!) is reporter for the ABC News Medical Unit and a prolific NYC health journalist. It's very gratifying to be a way station on folk's journey through success. Here's his latest: abcnews.go.com/US/whooping-...
abcnews.go.com
Whooping cough cases skyrocket in Texas, quadrupling last year's numbers
Texas is currently seeing four times the number of whooping cough cases compared to the same time last year.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
I'm as happy as the next person that Bass Pro Shops is now a fashion statement, but I already miss all the Carhartt.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
If you are on the editorial board of a journal and you haven't reviewed a paper for that journal in over 1000 days and you get sent a request to review and you decline that request and you don't even have the courtesy to recommend other reviews.... you shouldn't be on that editorial board.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
... and a faculty meeting is less a Council of Elrond than it is an HOA.
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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
A university committee is a gathering of important people who individually can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.
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Python Software Foundation @python.org · 27/10/2025
TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵
python.org
The official home of the Python Programming Language
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M.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Spotted on LinkedIn... a bad AI summary of our new paper on risks of AI in research. Please make it stop.
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