iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Happy to finally see this one out in the world!

Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Importantly, we also show that decoding accuracy holds whether or not you think the trait describes that person (ie trait endorsement). This suggests that when thinking of others, parts of your brain may be generating a general representation of them that is less sensitive to contextual information.

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

These results replicate previous identity decoding studies using faces and other information but does so in a trait-judgment task devoid of lower-level perceptual cues, with multiple well-known individuals as targets, and in a much larger sample than previous studies.

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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 · 07/09/2026

Growing up, my dad worked the midnight shift at a grocery store stocking shelves, unloading trucks, and breaking down freight pallets.... I don't think anything I do counts as "labor" 🤓

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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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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I'm sure all of that magic will make its way into the AI training data.

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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

To me, meeting the challenges where they are *is* building the foundations. So, no disagreement here 🙂

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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

It does, and I'm glad I poked the bear. Thanks for sharing!

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

No. It is just him attempting to validate his affinity for long-discredited Freudian ideas though widely recognized limitations modern biological psychiatry. It's not new or provocative; it's lazy and undeserving of platforming in a major media puff piece.

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Recently, I've grown very sour to the current state of clinical psychology in both research and practice. I still believe it can be helpful to folks (either through "evidence based" treatments or psychoanalytic methods), but it feels more and more like a flock of dodo birds all the way down.

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

He "promotes" them as part of his lifestyle brand. I believe a big chunk of the recent dopamine delusion can be traced directly back to him and his podcast. The thing about Huberman, however, is that he is not stupid. But as such, he knows better than what he is selling. And that is the worst part.

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

At least we have influential people with big platforms to help right the ship... ⚰️

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Does it come with matching earrings?

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

And completely REWIRES your brain! WIRES!!! THINK ABOUT THE WIRES!!!

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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

(Debbie also gave a better explanation of RSA than I have seen most cog neuro faculty do... she's the real deal.)

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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 · 11/05/2026

Not Gen X, but... Black Hole Sun warped me into forever needing participation trophies for my great recession arrested development. #yolo

static.klipy.com

Black Hole Sun Soundgarden Barbie Burn

ALT: Black Hole Sun Soundgarden Barbie Burn

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Not to mention, when people use relatively robust behavioral measures (e.g. cog ability) in large samples but fail to find a brain-behavior correlation, it's always seen as the neuroimaging's shortcoming, not the behavior measure. I'm less convinced of that lately. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals - Nature

Combined data from three large studies, with a total sample size of around 50,000 individuals, indicate that many previous studies linking the brain to complex phenotypes have been...

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

It's true. But some people are doing the hard work and not getting the credit for it. Unfortunately, these efforts are often completely overlooked by folks both within and outside of the subfield. For example, here are two posters from a social neuro conference last month. They weren't alone.

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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

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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

We've been doing similar things with wb_view for awhile. It's fine (and looks good when you get it right), but this is so much more streamlined and contained.... I'm also a bit of an R stan at heart.

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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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Rob Chavez @robchavez.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Link :: Yoshi (...I like Ness too)

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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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