Welcome to the Edinburgh Concepts and Causality Lab

We study how the mind works, using a combination of psychology experiments and computational modeling. We are based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Here are some of the things we are interested in:

• Causal reasoning: how do people use causal models to reason about the world? How do they assign causal responsibility? One of the main outputs of this line of research has been a theory of how people judge the relative causal responsibility of the different factors that led to an event. See here for a short paper, here for a much longer paper, and here for a real-world case study. Other lines of research explore for example how causal information informs categorization and what makes some counterfactual possibilities more plausible than others.

• Theory of mind: how do people predict and explain the behavior of other agents? We have built computational models of how people infer the weight that others put on their welfare (see here and here), and proposed a new theory of the folk concept of intentional action. More recently we have been exploring how theory of mind can work efficiently in the face of cognitive resource constraintss.

We draw on the insights of several different fields, including:

• computational cognitive science: we like to think about the information-processing problems that the mind is designed to solve, at a relatively high level of abstraction. To do so we use tools like probability, information theory and causal modeling.

• experimental philosophy: we think that laypeople’s intuitions about philosophical questions can hold rich insights about how the mind works. Therefore our research draws on, and contributes to, work studying these intuitions.

• evolutionary biology: evolution is a powerful meta-theoretical framework to study how biological systems work, including the human mind. In our research, we keep in mind general evolutionary principles, and also sometimes use specific methods like evolutionary game theory.

Selected publications (see full list here)

An information-bottleneck view of social stereotype use
M. Taylor-Davies, T. Quillien
Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, forthcoming
[pdf] [code]

Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty
T. Quillien, N. Bramley, C. Lucas
Cognitive Psychology, 2025
[pdf] [blog] [code_and_data] [thread]

Counterfactuals and the logic of causal selection
T. Quillien, C. Lucas
Psychological Review, 2023
[pdf] [code_and_data] [thread]

Rational inferences about social valuation
T. Quillien, J. Tooby, L. Cosmides
Cognition, 2023
[pdf] [SI] [code_and_data] [thread]

A simple definition of 'intentionally'
T. Quillien, T. German
Cognition, 2021
[pdf] [SI] [code_and_data] [thread]

When do we think that X caused Y?
T. Quillien
Cognition, 2020
[pdf] [SI] [code] [media]