Quantum Structure in Cognition

By Diederik Aerts. 2008

397 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The broader scope of our investigations is the search for the way in which concepts and their combinations carry and influence meaning and what this implies for human thought. More specifically, we examine the use of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics as a modeling instrument and propose a general mathematical modeling scheme for the combinations of concepts. We point out that quantum mechanical principles, such as superposition and interference, are at the origin of specific effects in cognition related to concept combinations, such as the guppy effect and the overextension and underextension of membership weights of items. We work out a concrete quantum mechanical model for a large set of experimental data of membership weights with overextension and underextension of items with respect to the conjunction and disjunction of pairs of concepts, and show that no classical model is possible for these data. We put forward an explanation by linking the presence of quantum aspects that model concept combinations to the basic process of concept formation. We investigate the implications of our quantum modeling scheme for the structure of human thought, and show the presence of a two-layer structure consisting of a classical logical layer and a quantum conceptual layer. We consider connections between our findings and phenomena such as the disjunction effect and the conjunction fallacy in decision theory, violations of the sure thing principle, and the Allais and Elsberg paradoxes in economics.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d35e0ed3582d927ce96007efe5f9c53978af1994

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Citations in the corpus

A quantum theoretical explanation for probability judgment errors. (2011, methodology): “More advanced versions of quantum probability theory (using a Fock space, which is analogous to a hierarchical Bayesian type model) provide principles for combining both types of representations (Aerts, 2009).”
Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision (2012, methodology): “In a simple version of the quantum model (Aerts, 2009), concepts A and B are represented as states |A〉, |B〉 ∈ C(3) of a three-dimensional complex Hilbert space.”