Feynman on Quantum Simulation—Rush to Judgement

Immanuel Bloch

Martha Lewis

Cognitive Science is the study of the mind and how it relates to human behaviour. As a field, it is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together theories from Psychology, Neuroscience, Biology, and others. The field of cognitive science operates at a number of levels. On the one hand, some aspects of cognitive science look at the behaviour of neurons, whereas other aspects look to explain human behaviour at a more abstract level, seeking to explain human decision making or reasoning. A key area of research in cognitive science is how to formalise human behaviours around judgements of similarity, categorization, and decision making. In the field of Physics, Quantum Mechanics has fundamentally altered our understanding of the way in which particles behave. Quantum mechanics has a number of unintuitive phenomena, some of which can be used model unusual aspects of human behaviour. The application of quantum theory to model human behaviour is wide-ranging. In this chapter we will look at three main areas in which it has been applied. One key area is in how similarity judgements can be modelled. There are a number of phenomena around similarity judgements that are not well modelled using a view of concepts that does not take the state of the observer into account. These include the asymmetry of similarity judgements and the fact that similarity can change depending on other exemplars that are present. Another key area is in judgement and decision-making. Again, puzzling phenomena have been observed regarding the fact that judgements do not follow classical probability theory, known as the conjunction fallacy, can depend crucially on the order in which questions are presented or on the amount of knowledge about the world. Finally, approaches to modelling cognitive phenomena at the neural level will also be discussed within a quantum-theoretic framework.

Peng Zhang, Dawei Song, Yuexian Hou +2 more

Quantum theory has recently been employed to further advance the theory of information retrieval (IR). A challenging research topic is to investigate the so called quantum-like interference in users’ relevance judgement process, where users are involved to judge the relevance degree of each document with respect to a given query. In this process, users’ relevance judgement for the current document is often interfered by the judgement for previous documents, due to the interference on users’ cognitive status. Research from cognitive science has demonstrated some initial evidence of quantum-like cognitive interference in human decision making, which underpins the user’s relevance judgement process. This motivates us to model such cognitive interference in the relevance judgement process, which in our belief will lead to a better modeling and explanation of user behaviors in relevance judgement process for IR and eventually lead to more user-centric IR models. In this paper, we propose to use probabilistic automaton(PA) and quantum finite automaton (QFA), which are suitable to represent the transition of user judgement states, to dynamically model the cognitive interference when the user is judging a list of documents.

Christopher R. Monroe

Jerome R. Busemeyer, Masanao Ozawa, Emmanuel M. Pothos +1 more

An important challenge for quantum theories of cognition and decision concerns the incorporation of memory for recently made judgements and their effects on later judgements. First, we review a general approach to measurement based on system plus environment representations of states and measurement instruments. These more general measurement models provide ways to incorporate the effects of recent judgements on later judgements. Then we compare three different measurement models that are based on these more general measurement operations to account for a puzzling collection of question order effect findings.This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum theory and topology in models of decision making (Part 1)'.

H. D. Zeh