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 explanation: how do people efficiently communicate the content of their causal models of 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.

• 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 (see here).

• The role of causality in conceptual structure: concepts are in part defined by representations of causal relationships; for example it is part of the concept ‘bird’ that birds can fly because they have wings. See here or here for general considerations, and here for a case study.

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)

Lossy encoding of distributions in judgment under uncertainty
T. Quillien, N. Bramley, C. Lucas
Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
[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]