People
We are looking to hire graduate students for this admission cycle (2024-2025). If interested, please contact Tadeg with some information about your research interests and background.
Tadeg Quillien (Principal Investigator)
Stephanie Droop (Affiliated graduate student)
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.
Nicolas Navarre (Affiliated graduate student)
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.
Madeleine Horner (Affiliated graduate student)
My research interests lie at the intersection of social and cognitive psychology, with a focus on the cognitive mechanisms underlying empathy. My work explores empathy not just as a pro-social emotion, but as a social signal that can indicate intentions and foster closeness. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how people infer another’s level of empathy based on their observable pro-social actions and how these inferences can be utilized to identify ingroup versus outgroup membership. To examine these questions, I use computational models of social cognition and Bayesian inference, aiming to uncover the processes that guide how empathy is perceived and understood in social interactions.
I completed my undergraduate studies in Psychology, with a minor in the History of Consciousness, at the University of California Santa Cruz. I then went on to complete a MSc in Psychological Research at the University of Edinburgh. I am now undertaking a PhD in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Adam Moore and Tadeg Quillien.