I am a chancellor's fellow (~=lecturer; US equivalent: ~=assistant professor) in psychology 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. 

Broadly speaking, my research is motivated by the following question: what are the basic building blocks of thought? How do they structure the way we spontaneously think and feel about the world?

Recently I have developed simple theories of the intuitive concepts of causation and intentional action. According to the first theory, people tend to think "C caused E" to the extent that events E and C are correlated across counterfactual worlds. According to the second theory, people think that an agent did X intentionally if her attitude toward X caused X. I have been arguing that both theories have a very close fit to the empirical data about how people use these concepts.

I also work on social cognition, using a combination of experiments, evolutionary game theory, and agent-based simulations.

I can be reached at tadeg.quillien AT gmail.com