J. Acácio de Barros

Catarina Moreira, Jose Acacio de Barros

Order effects occur when judgments about a hypothesis's probability given a sequence of information do not equal the probability of the same hypothesis when the information is reversed. Different experiments have been performed in the literature that supports evidence of order effects. We proposed a Bayesian update model for order effects where each question can be thought of as a mini-experiment where the respondents reflect on their beliefs. We showed that order effects appear, and they have a simple cognitive explanation: the respondent's prior belief that two questions are correlated. The proposed Bayesian model allows us to make several predictions: (1) we found certain conditions on the priors that limit the existence of order effects; (2) we show that, for our model, the QQ equality is not necessarily satisfied (due to symmetry assumptions); and (3) the proposed Bayesian model has the advantage of possessing fewer parameters than its quantum counterpart.

J. Acacio de Barros

In this paper we present a neural oscillator model of stimulus response theory that exhibits quantum-like behavior. We then show that without adding any additional assumptions, a quantum model constructed to fit observable pairwise correlations has no predictive power over the unknown triple moment, obtainable through the activation of multiple oscillators. We compare this with the results obtained in de Barros (2013), where a criteria of rationality gives optimal ranges for the triple moment.

J. Acacio de Barros

In this paper we provide a simple random-variable example of inconsistent information, and analyze it using three different approaches: Bayesian, quantum-like, and negative probabilities. We then show that, at least for this particular example, both the Bayesian and the quantum-like approaches have less normative power than the negative probabilities one.