Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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185983

Experimental evidence for quantum structure in cognition

Diederik Aerts

pp. 59-70

Abstract

We prove a theorem that shows that a collection of experimental data of membership weights of items with respect to a pair of concepts and its conjunction cannot be modeled within a classical measure theoretic weight structure in case the experimental data contain the effect called overextension. Since the effect of overextension, analogue to the well-known guppy effect for concept combinations, is abundant in all experiments testing weights of items with respect to pairs of concepts and their conjunctions, our theorem constitutes a no-go theorem for classical measure structure for common data of membership weights of items with respect to concepts and their combinations. We put forward a simple geometric criterion that reveals the non classicality of the membership weight structure and use experimentally measured membership weights estimated by subjects in experiments from [26] to illustrate our geometrical criterion. The violation of the classical weight structure is similar to the violation of the well-known Bell inequalities studied in quantum mechanics, and hence suggests that the quantum formalism and hence the modeling by quantum membership weights, as for example in [17] , can accomplish what classical membership weights cannot do.

Publication details

Published in:

Bruza Peter, Sofge Donald A., Lawless William F. (2009) Quantum interaction: Third international symposium, Qi 2009, Saarbrücken, Germany, March 25-27, 2009. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 59-70

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-00834-4_7

Full citation:

Aerts Diederik (2009) „Experimental evidence for quantum structure in cognition“, In: P. Bruza, D. A. Sofge & W. F. Lawless (eds.), Quantum interaction, Dordrecht, Springer, 59–70.