Rob Chavez

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Last Friday, Curtis Phills and I ran our first conference! Introducing CODES. The Consortium of Oregon Diversity and Equity Scholars! We were excited to bring together folks across Oregon who do diversity science work. We need community more than ever. Hope we can continue this in future years...

Colorado Social Vision & Mind Lab The Social Vision & Mind Lab (Director: Youngki Hong, Ph.D.) at the University of Colorado Boulder explores how people perceive and make sense of the physica...

I’m admitting 1–2 Ph.D. students to join my lab in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder, starting Fall 2026. We study person perception, stereotyping and prejudice, and intervention science.

Application info: www.colorado.edu/psych-neuro/...
Lab info: www.svmlab.org

University of Colorado Boulder Psychology & Neuroscience is searching for TWO tenure track assistant professors!!

jobs.colorado.edu/jobs/JobDeta...

#socialpsychology #cogpsyc #PsychSciSky #PsychJob
#psycjobs #psychology

1/n

As someone who teaches until mid-June, I have a bevy of polished expletives ready and waiting for those folks.

Me just realizing our Fall term starts in a week..

If you can't be bothered to read, why are trying to be a scientist. Baffling...

I think your point about the political formations is true, but I think that is truer in some places more than others. For the latter, it is less about asserting power than it is just old fashion apathy or laziness. Interdisciplinary thinking and training is not the outcome either way.

1000%. I believe that our compartmentalized areas have led to a generation of compartmentalized scholars.

"To the degree that these tools are saving time and energy, I am not seeing researchers reinvest those savings into developing a deeper understanding of their subject matter, making connections to new ideas, or otherwise investing in advancing their current skillset."

Wonderful essay.

👊✊

me too 🥰

A Vibe Coder's Millennium I got my first home computer in late 2000 when I was in the middle of 10th grade.

My latest piece, on apprenticeship, artificial intelligence, and intrinsic motivation. Handcrafted from the heart.

Please, share and enjoy.

open.substack.com/pub/robchave...

She was an older black lady who was watching her cute little grand daughter mash an avocado around her lips. I told her my kids did this to me... She understood.

Cognitive Dissonance: When you rename it "Department of War", while pouting that you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

😆

Narrator: He didn't look cool.

A lady at the coffee shop this morning asked me if the gray in my hair was real or if I dyed it that way to look cool... ⚰️

Me too (...both physical and psychological)

That goes double if it was at the Launchpad..

Effect of confound mass on true positive rates under FDR correction. Confound mass represents how large a confound is in terms of the product of its voxel extent and effect size. Results are shown at differing combinations of true effect size, true effect voxel extent, 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.

Effect of confound effect size on true positive rates for task effects under FDR correction. Colors indicate sample sizes: N = 25 in blue, N = 50 in green, and N = 100 in orange. Effect sizes are reflected by the darkness of each color, with light shades representing d = .2, medium d = .5, and dark d = .8. The task brain maps and confound brain maps referenced in each panel are shown in Figure 3.

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).

After 5 years, I finally carved out time to turn this blog post on FDR (markallenthornton.com/blog/fdr-pro...) into a manuscript. The preprint features a much broader range of simulations showing how FDR promotes confounds, and how this effect compounds with publication bias: osf.io/preprints/ps...

"Wait...hair and saliva samples have different statistical properties and often aren't correlated within subjects???... But stress... STRESS , RIGHT?!?!"

And, of course, asking what the methods are (and are not) good for.

Does brain imaging help us solve bigotry? Probably not.

Does it help us learn about the brain? Maybe.

Like it or hate it (I like it), Substack makes it super easy to port over old blogs from other sites (though I'm not sure about Typepad in particular). It will even retain the original post dates, which is nice.

I agree. I also think that amplifies the problems more than it capitalizes on its promises.

If this is like brain imaging, in a few years it will mean people with a genuine interest in these topics will be doing harder work with fewer rewards while being left to clean up the mess of social psychology trend-chasers & careerists looking for a magic methodological shortcut that doesn't exist.

New policy: if you want to complain about PsyArxiv (a free service that didn’t exist 15 years ago), you must sign up to be a moderator.

We’re searching for a Developmental Neuroscientist! Building on UO’s rich tradition in the field, we’re excited to welcome the next scientist to carry it forward.

Lest we let PsyArXiv become full of more stuff like this...

Don't worry. He also teaches in the undisputedly objective area of... *professional ethics*