Quantum Structure in Cognition, Origins, Developments, Successes and Expectations
This work addresses the challenge of understanding and formalizing human cognitive processes for researchers in cognitive science and quantum foundations, representing a novel interdisciplinary approach rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling human concept formation and reasoning, which deviates from classical logic and probability, by identifying and applying quantum structures in cognition. It successfully models various cognitive experiments using a quantum-theoretic framework in Fock space, including recent discoveries of entanglement and indistinguishability in concept combinations.
We provide an overview of the results we have attained in the last decade on the identification of quantum structures in cognition and, more specifically, in the formalization and representation of natural concepts. We firstly discuss the quantum foundational reasons that led us to investigate the mechanisms of formation and combination of concepts in human reasoning, starting from the empirically observed deviations from classical logical and probabilistic structures. We then develop our quantum-theoretic perspective in Fock space which allows successful modeling of various sets of cognitive experiments collected by different scientists, including ourselves. In addition, we formulate a unified explanatory hypothesis for the presence of quantum structures in cognitive processes, and discuss our recent discovery of further quantum aspects in concept combinations, namely, 'entanglement' and 'indistinguishability'. We finally illustrate perspectives for future research.