People

I am a chancellor’s fellow (research-focused faculty member) in the Psychology department at the University of Edinburgh. Before that, I was a postdoc with Chris Lucas and Neil Bramley (also at Edinburgh). I did my PhD at UCSB’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology, working with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

email: tadeg.quillien AT gmail.com

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My research questions tackle how mental representation and abstraction work. What is gained and what is lost when we conceptualise or formalise? How do we choose the best level of detail for an explanation?

I have a strong interest in methodological issues in psychology and how that relates to the wider philosophy of science. When is it helpful to lever opposing viewpoints, and when is it important to adopt a definite stance?

I have been interested in content and meaning ever since coming into contact with abstract art and semiotics in my undergraduate degree. At the same time, learning to speak and write in Russian let me see the complex relationship between language and thought.

Before reentering higher education in 2017 I worked as an analyst in accounting and finance.

My PhD (September 2021 to August 2025) is funded by the Natural Language Processing Centre for Doctoral Training.

email: s0342840 AT sms.ed.ac.uk

google scholar

I am interested in studying human learning by modeling the mental representations of causality and concepts more broadly. I aim to make use of theories from natural language semantics to inform the class of mental representations used in causal inference and hypothesis formation.

I am originally from Colombia, but I grew up in Canada where I studied Engineering Physics at the University of British Columbia. With an emerging interest in artificial intelligence, I turned to study the human mind at the Cogmaster in Paris. Through interactions with the linguistics department of the Cogmaster, I was inspired to apply natural language semantics to models of learning and reasoning.

email: n.s.navarre AT sms.ed.ac.uk