Erik Zeiner

I am a PhD student in the Cognitive Science & Pragmatics Group at the Department of Linguistics, University of Tübingen. I am part of the Tübingen–Edinburgh collaborative project Communicating Causality, working alongside my supervisor Michael Franke (PI) and Karl Mulligan in Tübingen, together with Dan Lassiter (PI) and Dean McHugh in Edinburgh. My research focuses on using tools from formal and experimental pragmatics to bridge philosophical theories and computational models of causal cognition. Currently, I am mainly working on causal selection and inference.

In addition, I am part of a joint project with the Department of Psychology in Tübingen, where we are developing an agentic AI Therapist-Skills-Coach to help students strengthen their psychotherapeutic competencies through generated structured feedback.

I am also interested in how information conveyed through different modalities can alter the interpretation of linguistic meaning. Currently, I am working on manual gestures and emoji.