Are Colors Quanta of Light for Human Vision? A Quantum Cognition Study of Visual Perception
This provides a novel theoretical framework for understanding visual perception, potentially impacting cognitive science and quantum cognition, but it is incremental as it builds on existing quantum models.
The paper tackles the problem of explaining human color perception by proposing that colors are quanta of light for vision, analogous to photons in physics, and shows that quantum measurement processes like decoherence warp distances between states in a way that matches perceptual categorization effects.
We show that colors are light quanta for human visual perception in a similar way as photons are light quanta for physical measurements of light waves. Our result relies on the identification in the quantum measurement process itself of the warping mechanism which is characteristic of human perception. This warping mechanism makes stimuli classified into the same category perceived as more similar, while stimuli classified into different m categories are perceived as more different. In the quantum measurement process, the warping takes place between the pure states, which play the role played for human perception by the stimuli, and the density states after decoherence, which play the role played for human perception by the percepts. We use the natural metric for pure states, namely the normalized Fubini Study metric to measure distances between pure states, and the natural metric for density states, namely the normalized trace-class metric, to measure distances between density states. We then show that when pure states lie within a well-defined region surrounding an eigenstate, the quantum measurement, namely the process of decoherence, contracts the distance between these pure states, while the reverse happens for pure states lying in a well-defined region between two eigenstates, for which the quantum measurement causes a dilation. We elaborate as an example the situation of a two-dimensional quantum measurement described by the Bloch model and apply it to the situation of two colors 'Light' and 'Dark'. We argue that this analogy of warping, on the one hand in human perception and on the other hand in the quantum measurement process, makes colors to be quanta of light for human vision.