Rob Chavez

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

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...

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

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

This also dovetails with thoughts I have had the topic too. People are using AI tools for lots of things in academia, and that's often perfectly fine. But I think it is important to be mindful about both what you are getting and what you are giving up.

robchavez.substack.com/p/a-vibe-cod...

A nice, level-headed post about the motivations and outcomes of using technology (including LLMs) in research that you care about.

Valuing the Process vs. the Product in Research On reasonable resistance to using GenAI in research

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...

I need to make sure the decade old code/dependancies still runs... but that's not a bad idea.

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...

❤️

Today, the RAs in my lab told me I have "girl dad energy."

I've got some practice...

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

Are you telling me she's almost qualified for emeritus status?!!..
😉

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…

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...

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-...

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.

a cartoon character is playing frisbee in a park with the number 2 on the bottom of the screen ALT: a cartoon character is playing frisbee in a park with the number 2 on the bottom of the screen

The phone lines are blowing up!

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 🤨 🤷

No adversaries..

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.

My 8yo son recently complimented my produce shopping skills by exclaiming, "these raspberries are bussin!" ... It was validating.

"ai is inevitable" is a high accuracy indicator of "I am a sucker"

🎯

a man is standing in front of a fire and looking at the camera with a surprised look on his face . ALT: a man is standing in front of a fire and looking at the camera with a surprised look on his face .

That's my secret....
Everything radicalizes me.

Uhh... well ...

Of course, we are the only department with this kind of scantron... The good news is that the GE in charge of this is in my class is very on top of it, knew before the department did, and has already calmed my nerves a lot...
(🙏 Marcus)

Class is officially done and many of them have already headed back home (and there are way too many of them anyway). But that would certainly make it very easy to score!

Worth a test run.

This basically might be what we end up doing. No joke 😵

If only... 😵

Yeah, people have. But I'm worried the scripts they use are not trained our kind of scantron papers (which are are less common). Scanning them is a bit of a bottleneck too, but I can't think of another way.