Among the most defining characteristics of our species are the capacities for a rich sense of self and the depth of our social cognition. How does the human brain build models of ourselves and other people, and how do we use this information to guide our behavior in the real world? Dr. Chavez is an interdisciplinary researcher who uses a combination of multimodal neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI and diffusion MRI) and computational methods to understand how the brain represents information about the self, the people around us, and the cognitive and emotional mechanisms that support these processes. As such, his work draws on theoretical and methodological approaches from cognitive neuroscience, social and personality psychology, and data science to generate mutually informative insights across multiple levels of analysis.
Dr. Chavez is interested in accepting new doctoral students for Fall 2026.
Selected publications:
Chavez, R.S., Guthrie, T.D., & Kapustka, J.M. (2025). Person knowledge is independently encoded by allocentric and egocentric reference frames within separate brain systems. Psychological Science, 36(4), 265-277.
Stendel, M.S., Guthrie, T.D., Guazzelli Williamson, V., & Chavez, R.S. (2024). Self-esteem modulates the representation of the self in the brains of others. Communications Psychology, 2(113), 1-8.
Guthrie, T.D., & Chavez, R.S. (2024). Normativity vs. uniqueness: Effects of social relationship strength on neural representations of others. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 19(1), 1-10.
Stendel, M.S., & Chavez, R.S. (2023). Beyond the brain localization of complex traits: Distributed white matter markers of personality. Journal of Personality, 91, 1140-1151.
Guthrie, T.D., Benadjaoud, Y.Y., & Chavez, R.S. (2022). Social relationship strength modulates the similarity of brain-to-brain representations of group members. Cerebral Cortex, 32, 2469–2477.
Chavez, R.S., Tovar, D.T., Stendel, M.S., & Guthrie, T.D. (2022). Generalizing effects of frontostriatal structural connectivity on self-esteem using predictive modeling. Cortex, 146, 66-73.
Chavez, R.S., & Wagner, D.D. (2020). The neural representation of self is recapitulated in the brains of friends: A round-robin fMRI study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118(3), 407-416.
Chavez, R.S., Heatherton, T.H., & Wagner, D.D. (2017). Neural population decoding reveals the intrinsic positivity of the self. Cerebral Cortex, 11(1), 5222-5229.
