Central to quantum theory is the concept of complementarity. In this essay, we argue that complementarity is also central to the emerging field of quantum cognition. We review the concept, its historical roots in psychology, and its development in quantum physics and offer examples of how it can be used to understand human cognition. The concept of complementarity provides a valuable and fresh perspective for organizing human cognitive phenomena and for understanding the nature of measurements in psychology. In turn, psychology can provide valuable new evidence and theoretical ideas to enrich this important scientific concept.
Central to quantum theory is the concept of complementarity. In this essay, we argue that complementarity is also central to the emerging field of quantum cognition. We review the concept, its historical roots in psychology, and its development in quantum physics and offer examples of how it can be used to understand human cognition. The concept of complementarity provides a valuable and fresh perspective for organizing human cognitive phenomena and for understanding the nature of measurements in psychology. In turn, psychology can provide valuable new evidence and theoretical ideas to enrich this important scientific concept.
Quantum cognition is a new research program that uses mathematical principles from quantum theory as a framework to explain human cognition, including judgment and decision making, concepts, reasoning, memory, and perception. This research is not concerned with whether the brain is a quantum computer. Instead, it uses quantum theory as a fresh conceptual framework and a coherent set of formal tools for explaining puzzling empirical findings in psychology. In this introduction, we focus on two quantum principles as examples to show why quantum cognition is an appealing new theoretical direction for psychology: complementarity, which suggests that some psychological measures have to be made sequentially and that the context generated by the first measure can influence responses to the next one, producing measurement order effects, and superposition, which suggests that some psychological states cannot be defined with respect to definite values but, instead, that all possible values within the superposition have some potential for being expressed. We present evidence showing how these two principles work together to provide a coherent explanation for many divergent and puzzling phenomena in psychology.
The paper "What Is Quantum Cognition, and How Is It Applied to Psychology?" by Busemeyer and Wang (2015) introduces the concept of quantum cognition as a framework for understanding human cognition in psychology.This critical analysis aims to evaluate the key arguments and contributions presented in the paper.The authors propose quantum cognition as a research program that utilizes mathematical principles from quantum theory to explain various aspects of human cognition, such as judgment, decision-making, concepts, reasoning, memory, and perception.They emphasize that quantum cognition does not focus on whether the brain is a quantum computer, but rather utilizes quantum theory as a fresh conceptual framework and a set of formal tools for elucidating empirical findings in psychology.The authors specifically highlight two quantum principles, complementarity, and superposition, to demonstrate the potential of quantum cognition as a theoretical direction for psychology.Complementarity suggests that some psychological measures need to be made sequentially, where the context generated by the first measure can influence responses to the next one, leading to measurement order effects.Superposition suggests that certain psychological states cannot be defined by definite values, but rather encompass a range of potential expressions.This critical review will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments presented by Busemeyer and Wang, evaluate the evidence supporting their claims, and discuss the implications of quantum cognition for the field of psychology.
The emergence of quantum computing has prompted researchers to examine potential parallels between quantum mechanical principles and human cognitive processes. This article explores the theoretical framework of quantum cognition, examining how concepts from quantum mechanics, including superposition, entanglement, and measurement, might inform our understanding of human decision-making, memory, and consciousness. While quantum computing operates on fundamentally different physical principles than biological neural networks, the mathematical formalisms of quantum mechanics offer novel perspectives on cognitive phenomena that classical probability theory struggles to explain. This review critically examines the current state of quantum cognition research, its applications in computational modeling, and the ongoing debates regarding the validity of quantum mechanical analogies in psychological theory. The analysis reveals both promising theoretical insights and significant limitations in applying quantum principles to human cognition, highlighting the need for empirical validation and careful distinction between mathematical analogy and physical reality.
This paper begins with a historical review of the mutual influence of physics and psychology, from Freud's invention of psychic energy inspired by von Boltzmann' thermodynamics to the enrichment quantum physics gained from the side of psychology by the notion of complementarity (the invention of Niels Bohr who was inspired by William James), besides we consider the resonance of the correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung in both physics and psychology. Then we turn to the problem of development of mathematical models for laws of thought starting with Boolean logic and progressing towards foundations of classical probability theory. Interestingly, the laws of classical logic and probability are routinely violated not only by quantum statistical phenomena but by cognitive phenomena as well. This is yet another common feature between quantum physics and psychology. In particular, cognitive data can exhibit a kind of the probabilistic interference effect. This similarity with quantum physics convinced a multi-disciplinary group of scientists (physicists, psychologists, economists, sociologists) to apply the mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics to modeling of cognition. We illustrate this activity by considering a few concrete phenomena: the order and disjunction effects, recognition of ambiguous figures, categorization-decision making. In Appendix 1 we briefly present essentials of theory of contextual probability and a method of representations of contextual probabilities by complex probability amplitudes (solution of the ``inverse Born's problem'') based on a quantum-like representation algorithm (QLRA).
We describe the concept of complementarity and argue that it is a useful concept for consciousness and other studies at the interface of conscious phenomena and physical reality. After outlining the history and source of the concept within psychology, we describe its place as a working hypothesis for the mind-brain problem. We then point out that generalized quantum non-locality could be of importance even for macroscopic objects. If this is so, complementarity would be the key-concept to understand EPR-like correlated systems.
The representation and processing of concepts is one of the hardest challenges in cognitive science. While computer scientists and engineers have focused on developing advances for particular tasks, philosophers and cognitive scientists have focused on elucidating the structural nature of meaning. A remarkable bridge between these two limited-success approaches can be found in behavioral research, since, in a variety of tasks, humans process information at a conceptual level in a way that is incompatible with classical probability and fuzzy set theory. Recently, attempts have been made to use mathematical schemes founded on quantum structures as alternative approaches. For this reason, the application of quantum structures to this type of phenomena has received increasing attention. The quantum approach allows to faithfully model a number of non-classical deviations observed in experimental data. Moreover, it shows that genuine quantum theoretical notions, such as contextuality, superposition, emergence, and entanglement, are powerful epistemic tools to understand and represent cognitive phenomena. In this thesis, we identify the limitations of classical theories to handle some important cognitive tasks, and introduce the fundamentals of the quantum cognitive approach to concepts. Next, we perform a mathematical analysis of current concept combination models and develop an extension that allows for concrete representations of multiple exemplars simultaneously. Our analysis indicates that a superposition of logical reasoning and a specific form of non-logical reasoning, where non-logical reasoning is dominant, allows to faithfully represent the experimental data. Therefore, the non-logical reasoning introduced by this model represents an important but unexplored form of reasoning in humans. In addition, we develop novel experimental methodologies to identify quantum conceptual structures for concept combinations in the context of natural language processing and psychological experiments. Namely, we present a methodology to build entangled concepts represented as sets of words with respect to a corpus of text, and present a computational and psychological methodology to discern if a collection of concepts behaves statistically as a collection of quantum or classical particles. Using both methodologies we have identified a significant presence of quantum conceptual structure in the context of natural language processing and psychological experiments.